One of the first things Thomas Mira Y Lopez said to me
was, Oh, you're part of the dead dads club.
He quickly continued, I didn't mean that to sound irreverent.
And coming from him, it didn't.
It sounded understanding empathetic, knowing.
There's a quality about his language
that's sincere and endearing, with an underpinning
of dark humor.
We hear this engaging voice throughout his latest work,
The Book of Resting Places.
In this book, his language invites us into his mind
and into his obsession with death.
We struggle with what remains mean to us.
With what of us remains on Earth when we no longer do,
and with what that means to those who love us.
To those who still remain.
Mira y Lopez's prose brings to mind mathematical remainders
with what we do when something doesn't fit,
when something is left over.
What do we do with those remains.
The Book of Resting Places asks us
to tussle with the different ways we deal with the dead.
Whether that means entertaining a mother's plea
to stay in her apartment, Egyptian sarcophagus style,
or touring a cryogenics lab to imagine what happens to those
frozen in time, he approaches death in as many ways as he can
through trees with falling limbs in Central Park
and exhumed graves in Tucson.
Through this collection of essays,
we see a mind trying to wrap itself
around the ultimate unknowable entity.
Around death.
In perhaps my favorite essay, "Parallax," Mira y Lopez
uses the astronomical term to encompass both
his approach and his process.
He explains "Parallax" stating, simply put,
we see things differently from different places.
His book, of course, is the embodiment of this phenomenon.
And the word, embodiment, feels right placed next
to his assertion.
When something becomes disembodied,
we struggle to see it for what it really is.
When someone becomes disembodied,
we struggle to see him for what he once was.
In looking for an answer, an equation
to make sense of his father's death,
Mira Y Lopez shows us that sometimes there
are no answers, that sometimes the answer is in the looking
itself.
So thank you, Tommy, for sharing your words with us, for sharing
your looking with us.
For teaching us how to sit with remainders.