War destroys more than lives. It dismantles the moral order through which a life is recognized as precious, reducing the individual — bound to others through family, friendship, love and community — to one body among many.
In Fallen Sparrows, Susan confronts this dehumanization through a childhood memory of birds laid out after a hunt. Here, fallen young men lie scattered across the earth with pale wings — vulnerable lives treated as quarry and cast aside, denied the futures that should have been theirs.
War may depend upon distance, abstraction and the language of necessity. Fallen Sparrows asks us to look again — and to recognize, in every fallen figure, a life that mattered.
