John Brahm Death

The Reality of Death in John Brehm’s “Sotto Voce”

In John Brehm’s “Sotto Voce” he discusses the fear of death as an intangible in which people do not always acknowledge theirs or their peers actions of concealing their fear of death. People do not realize how quickly life can pass by, and they spend the majority of their time busying themselves to refrain from thinking of the worst: death. Brehm delivers his message by conveying the point that people try to cover up the idea of death with a redundant amount of discussion or avoidable behaviors. He expresses the idea that life can vanish right before your eyes, and how people should perhaps focus on the reality of things.

Firstly, many people try to avoid the certitude of death because
they fear the loss of everything they have. People generally do not want to face their fears, so they try to conceal and run away from them, thus leading them to excessive actions, such as talking, to busy their minds from thinking about the inevitable. As Brehm states in this poem, “To strip away the incessant chatter, yes, but what lies underneath it? Death, of course, or our fear of death. Which is why we talk so much, bury our heads in books, turn forests into pages and pages into mirrors in which we see ourselves appear and disappear.” Most people will find anything to keep their mind off the thought of death, but it is an unavoidable destiny for everyone.

In addition to people keeping their minds busy, they have also become ignorant to the fact that life can vanish right before one’s eyes.
The girl in the poem is very much full of life when she blows her warm breath onto the glass and writes a “joyful word” onto the steam, but the word disappears at about the same time she finishes writing it. This message signifies that one can be happy, and lively, but that doesn’t mean that one is immortal. One’s life can vanish just as quickly as the word on the glass. Life is destined to end, but no one can ever be sure of
when.

Finally, the poem indicates that people should begin to focus on the reality of life.
Brehm wrote, “When I look up from the story I’ve been reading about the Jews in Nazi Germany and the silence that closed their mouths forever, I see a girl outside the café smiling at her father who smiles back but cannot hear her. She makes all kinds of gestures with her hands, mimes herself inside an invisible box and breaks down laughing. Then she gathers her breath and blows it against the window.” The girl has passed time by, miming for her father to understand her, but when she finally has a moment to face the sensibility of things and what she is doing, she takes a deep breath in a moment of reality and apprehends that things will never change. She is still pleased to know that her father is there, but she takes that moment to herself to gain a sense of the real
world.

All things considered, life can pass by a lot quicker than one might think. People spend a large chunk of their time trying to cover up their fear of death by busying themselves with pointless things. It is time for people to discontinue their fear of death and accept the fact that it is destined to happen, and enjoy life while they can. “The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time” (Mark Twain). The time is now to set oneself in reality and start living while everyone can.

Works Cited
Brehm, John https://nexus.uwinnipeg.ca/d2l/le/content/9894/viewContent/86828/View
Twain, Mark http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/mark_twain.html