dying beautifully

You will be told the death was staged: humans do not die that way, blood does not move like that, limbs do not separate from bodies so easily, headless bodies appear only in fantastic stories, children do not die, explosives do not sound like that, sand does not interact that way with blood, a dead hand cannot possibly pose that way, real tears are never so eloquent, real men don’t cry, and only fools die when the sun is shining.

You will be told that war is glorious hues of color pinned on a hero’s chest, newly-composed marches that energize tramping feet, a light display more elegant than fireworks and more sublime than shooting stars, a muse that inspires empire-building epics, an endless source of scripts for global blockbusters, a necessary economy boost, a book that is unputdownable.

Walking into an art exhibition, you will be told about the new war-inspired techniques: paint extracted from lachrymal glands at the point of death, brushes created from delicate pre-pubescent eyelashes, splatter techniques modeled on rocket-splashed blood; you will learn about the underground market in “found art” that specializes in children’s shoes, quilts made from stolen burial shrouds, intricately layered loops of cries captured from the last 3 seconds before death, primitive sculptures made from pure blood-saturated soil. A clever artist will use all the available photographs of the war-killed to create a collage that honors the armament factories that sustain great economies.

Acting schools across the world will use footage of the dying to instruct students: fall this way, watch the blood fly out of you that way, feel your limbs detach this way, experience your flesh melting that way, demonstrate pain this way, illustrate loss that way, practice how to die beautifully.

And because acting students who have watched footage of the dying learn how to die beautifully, flinging limbs this way and that, decapitating their heads this way and that, spilling blood this way and that, those who watch them learn that dying is an art, begin to evaluate when dying is real, proclaim, with confidence, that some forms of dying do not look real, that some dying looks fake.

You will be told that children do not die that way, that they must have been trained by amateur acting coaches, that those are child-sized adults whose flailing limbs betray them, that such overacting is emotional manipulation, that the figure of the child should not be used to sway political decisions, that children cannot be aware they are dying, that the rules of war are child-friendly, that it is obscene to mention children in plush conference rooms full of strategists and world leaders bedeviled by moral dilemmas.

Children die so beautifully: untutored bodies fly in missile trajectories, young blood shimmers in sun waves, flexible limbs dance away from flying bodies, weightless tears prism rainbows, beautiful screams instruct birdsong, and muses weep because they do not know how to inspire such beauty.

We kill them because they die so beautifully.