People say you shouldn’t lie to your kids, that it breeds mistrust. But there’s no general wisdom for when your kid asks to see a corpse.
“Ask Siri, Papa,” your darling, innocent child asks you.
“Ask her what?”
“Ask her what a dead body looks like.”
Don’t play with me. You would lie.
“There are no pictures of dead bodies on the internet.”
“Hmph,” she says. She really says that, in two syllables. Hum-ff and folds her arms, lowers her brow, like she learned on a cartoon.
“Honey, it’s not good to look at pictures of dead bodies,” my wife says, instinctually understanding the importance of being honest with your kids.
A child’s mind seeking truth is rivaled in tenacity only by a rat seeking food. Both would chew through concrete to get to the reward on the other side, no matter how putrid and rotting. Nutrients are nutrients. Information is information.
“Why is it not good?”
Then, an eruption of why’s, little probes intended to detangle the 10,000 year knot of unnecessary human suffering in an afternoon, the answer to each the same: You’re not ready to understand that a day will come when dead bodies stack up all around you, in such numbers that you will orient your life in relation to them. Young people will chuckle at you behind your back for how much you talk about which friend died this week, who is on life support from tripping down the stairs to the den, who was put into hospice. And that’s if you’re lucky.
People say you shouldn’t lie to your kids. But what if you’re scared they’ll wish cancer upon you for raising them in a supersonic abattoir?
“Looking at dead bodies could give you bad dreams,” I tell her.
We’re both satisfied with that answer. For now. We move on to Legos.
People should say, “If you lie to your children, walk them toward the truth eventually.”
Establish first the glories of this life, so they may undergird the weight of death. She must first see a baby chick peck its way out of an egg. She must jump from a tree into a pond. She must throw a glass bottle against a wall.
We follow the instructions to build an animal hospital. I find the pieces, she makes them look like the pictures.
Chris Heavener was born and raised in Central Florida. Published in PANK, elimae, Vol 1 Brooklyn and Apocalypse Confidential. He lives in Durham, NC with his wife and kids.
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