My husband has been present throughout this whole situation in the particular way that dead people are present: in everything and in nothing.
Carl Mercer died of pancreatic cancer seven years ago. He was fifty-two. He had nine months between the diagnosis and the end of his life, and we used them as well as we could, which is what you say when you mean: we used them imperfectly and we tried hard and we did not waste all of it.
He would have been at Paige’s wedding. That is a certainty. He would have been there in whatever form the wedding had taken — courthouse, church, barn, wherever she had wanted. He would have driven two hours or ten hours or however far was needed, because that is who he was, and because he understood in the way that some fathers understand that their daughters do not always know what they need and that being present is not the same as being intrusive.
Paige’s grief about her father is, I think, partly connected to what she did. Not as an excuse — I want to be careful not to use Carl’s death as a way to explain away a choice Paige made consciously. But I think the experience of losing him at fifteen, and then losing him again in the way you lose people more fully as you grow older and understand better what they were, gave her a narrative about family that she struggled to hold together. With Carl gone, the story of her family had a hole in it. Filling the hole with the story that both parents were gone may have been, in some complicated emotional calculus, easier than saying: my father is dead and my mother is still here, and here is what that means and what she is like and what my real life looks like.