Literal rendition of 死ぬほど


I am trying to do a translation of this sentence and make it as literal as
possible and keep the shine of the wordplay, as part of a wordplay game I am
doing with a friend. I attempted a 直訳, but I am not sure what I should do with
死ぬほど, well, and 死にたい. There seems to be some intended puns packed into this
line. By the way, I am not sure about the exact source of this quote, probably
from a book or a show or something, but it is invoked online from time to
time.

> あなたが「死にたい」と思った今日は、昨日死んだ人達が死ぬほど「生きたい」と思った日なんです

My first stab:

> When you are thinking about death you need to know at the same time a lot of
> people who will die are trying so desperately to live.

And that was a complete failure and wasn't a literal translation in any sense
of the word. I also thought of "so much that they could/want to die" but it
didn't seem to work either. Another stab:

> When you are contemplating death, a lot of people who have died have all
> been in the same boat where their wish to survive was the death of them.

To my dismay the last part strays semantically...

### Edit:

One of the things I was struggling with in particular was the identification
of 昨日 and 今日. Is that hypothetical? I felt like 今日 was a temporal point with
respect to あなた, while 昨日 only applied to 死んだ人達. So how do they connect? Is the
sentence saying "your today is their yesterday" or is it merely metaphorical?




My _literal_ translation would be:

> Today, when you thought about death, is the same day those who died
> yesterday would have killed to live.

As you can tell, I am not a native speaker of English and therefore cannot
tell how much this really makes sense or to what extent the part with “would
have killed” retains the original pun.

* * *

A second try...

> Today, when you thought of dying, is the same day those who died yesterday
> had been dying to live.




My _literal_ translation would be:

> Today, when you thought about death, is the same day those who died
> yesterday would have killed to live.

As you can tell, I am not a native speaker of English and therefore cannot
tell how much this really makes sense or to what extent the part with “would
have killed” retains the original pun.

* * *

A second try...

> Today, when you thought of dying, is the same day those who died yesterday
> had been dying to live.

