Ruth lost her sister in 2019, and her sister had children who are now teenagers, and Ruth is more involved in their lives than she expected to be at this stage of her life. She has opinions about what it means to show up for people who have lost a parent. She shares these opinions in a way that is thoughtful and specific and which is, I think, shaped by her years as a school principal watching children navigate loss.
I lost Carl, and Carl was a good man who would have loved his grandchildren if Paige had given him the chance to meet the person she eventually married and built a life with. He was not perfect — no one is — but he was steady and honest and present, and those are the qualities I most miss about him, not on the worst days but on the ordinary ones when there is something to share and no one of his particular type to share it with.
Ruth asked about him once. Not intrusively — she asked in the way that someone asks who genuinely wants to know, and I told her. He was an electrician. He made good coffee. He was bad at expressing emotion directly but very good at expressing it through action, which meant that when he was worried about you he fixed something in your house whether it needed fixing or not. He died of a heart attack at fifty-two, which is the age Paige has known since she was old enough to understand it, and which is probably part of why Paige was willing to declare him dead in the first place — his death was real and recent and formative, and using it as the frame for a larger deception was, I think, a specific kind of cruelty that Paige did to herself as much as to me.