mattress graves

“Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich stärker.”

he used a potent phrase to describe the position of others who suffer like this, referring to them as lying on “mattress graves.”

…Indeed, if anything, it seems to have concentrated his attention on the way in which each debilitation builds on its predecessor and becomes one cumulative misery with only one possible outcome. After all, if it were otherwise, then each attack, each stroke, each vile hiccup, each slime assault, would collectively build one up and strengthen resistance. And this is plainly absurd.

So we are left with something quite unusual in the annals of unsentimental approaches to extinction: not the wish to die with dignity but the desire to have died.