But there were smaller things too. The eighteen months of Andrew’s life that I had missed. The eighteen months during which Ruth and David had been Andrew’s parents-in-law and I had not been, because I had been edited out. The conversations about Paige that the Lawsons and Andrew had been having in which I was not a living person.
I had been a kind of ghost for a year and a half. Not noticed, not mourned specifically, but absent in the way that dead people are absent: gone from the ordinary calculations of daily life.
I did not demand that Paige enumerate the specific losses. I did not sit her down and make her acknowledge each thing she had taken from me. That kind of accounting can become its own trap — a ledger of grievances that keeps two people from moving forward because they are too busy settling the record.
But I held it. I held all of it. And in the months since the dinner, as things have slowly become more normal, I have noticed that I allow myself to mention these things — briefly, without extended processing — when they come up naturally. When Andrew mentions something that happened over the past year and I have the instinct to say that I wasn’t there for that, I say it. Not as a recrimination. As the truth.
Paige flinches when I do it. The flinching is appropriate and I do not try to spare her from it.
## Carl in All of This