I am theorizing. I am not a therapist. But I knew Carl, and I know Paige, and I know the specific quality of her grief, and I think the decision to tell Andrew both parents were gone had something in it of wanting the story to be finished rather than partial.
There is something else. Carl would have liked Andrew. I know this with a confidence that comes from knowing someone for twenty-six years: Carl would have seen the same things I see in Andrew, the directness and the kindness and the earnest quality of a person who is trying to be good, and he would have appreciated them immediately.
I told Paige this in one of our October conversations. Not as a performance of generosity but because it was true and she needed to hear it.
She cried. The way she cries about her father, which is differently than she cries about anything else — the specific quality of grief that has no resolution.
“He would have been at the wedding,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And I would have let him.”
“I know.”
There was a long silence.
“I think some of this is about Dad,” she said. “I don’t know exactly how. But I think it’s about wanting to be someone whose story was — I don’t know. Complete.”
“Your story is not incomplete because your father died,” I said. “And it’s not incomplete because your mother is still here.”
“I know that now.”
“Do you know it yet in the places that matter? Not just in your head.”