Married, without them there
The day was always going to hold both things at once.
Somewhere in the planning there is a form, a seating chart, a spreadsheet, that makes you write down who is coming, and you get to the part where you would have written their name and sit there for a while before you can move on to the next box. Nobody warns you that a wedding is made of dozens of small administrative decisions and that grief will find you in the middle of most of them: who walks you down the aisle, whose name goes on the program, whether the band knows not to play the song you used to dance to with them in the kitchen.
A wedding is supposed to be the day everyone is fully present. Getting married without someone who should have been there means learning to hold an entire happy day and a very old, very specific loss in the same two hands.
The empty seat with a photograph on it
A lot of people end up doing some version of the same thing: a photograph propped on a chair near the front, a place card with a name and no plate, a locket sewn into a hem, a single flower left where they would have sat. It is a small physical answer to a problem with no real solution, which is that the day cannot include them and cannot fully happen without acknowledging that it should have. Some people skip the gesture entirely and carry it privately instead, which is just as valid. No version of the day makes the absence not true.
Joy and grief, the same afternoon
It surprises people how quickly the two can trade places. You are laughing at your sister's toast and then the missing arrives mid laugh, sharp, gone again within a few seconds, and you are back in the room. It happens during the first dance, during the walk down the aisle on someone else's arm because the arm you wanted was not available, during a quiet minute in front of a mirror where you catch your own reflection looking like them for exactly one second. None of this means the wedding is being ruined. It means you are having a full, complicated, entirely accurate response to a day that was always going to hold both things at once.
Speaking to them, before or after
The words that never got said often surface hardest on a day built around speeches. Some people write the toast they would have given and read it privately, to no one, the night before. Some make the call the morning of, to a receiver connected to nothing, and say the thing they most wanted them to know: that they made it, that they are getting married, that they wish they were in the second row. If it is your father you are missing that day, or your mother, there is no requirement to wait for a special occasion to say so out loud, but a wedding morning is as good a time as any.
Say what you need to say. The line is connected to nothing: no one hears you, nothing is recorded, nothing is stored.