His whole life on the brink of destruction if it were recognized what he was doing.
I'd had a problem myself all along, not seeing Edith as being on the brink of suicide.
That Dr Cornay was on the brink of making a discovery of considerable merit will by and by appear; but, with every disposition to regard his investigations favourably, it cannot be said that he accomplished it.
It seems as though there were always a number of young men hovering on the brink of such suicidal despair.
Robespierre, who was himself on the brink of the volcano, remembered the venomous sallies in the Journal de Paris.