The Psalms at Augustine's Death

In the final days of his life, struggling against a fever, Augustine asked that penitential psalms be copied out and hung on the walls of his room. Outside of visits from the doctor and being brought his meals, Augustine asked to be left alone to pray. He prayed these psalms alone for days before finally succumbing to the fever. 

This was how Possidius, Augustine's first biographer, described his death: 

Now the holy man in his long life given of God for the benefit and happiness of the holy Church (for he lived seventy-six years, almost forty of which he spent as a priest or bishop), in private conversations frequently told us that even after baptism had been received exemplary Christians and priests ought not depart from this life without fitting and appropriate repentance. And this he himself did in his last illness of which he died. For he commanded that the shortest penitential Psalms of David should be copied for him, and during the days of his sickness as he lay in bed he would look at these sheets as they hung upon the wall and read them; and he wept freely and constantly. And that his attention might not be interrupted by anyone, about ten days before he departed from the body he asked of us who were present that no one should come in to him, except only at the hours in which the physicians came to examine him or when nourishment was brought to him. This, accordingly, was observed and done, and he had all that time free for prayer.