The Empty Chair at a Wedding
Someone who should have been there has died. What couples actually do about it, why there is no correct version, and the practical parts nobody warns you about.
Someone who should have been at your wedding has died. A parent, a grandparent, a friend, a sibling. At some point while you are working out where everyone sits, you have to decide what to do about that, and the seating plan is usually where it stops being an idea and becomes a decision.
There is no correct version of this. That is not a soft opening, it is the actual state of things: two people in the same family will want opposite things, and both of them will be right about what they need.
What couples usually do
These are conventions, not recommendations. People have been working this out for a long time and have landed in a handful of places.
Leave a seat. A chair at the top table or at the family table, sometimes with a flower on it, sometimes with nothing. It is the most visible option and the one people mean when they say the empty chair.
A photograph. On a side table near the entrance, or a small frame at the family table. Less public than a chair, and easier for a guest to walk past if they need to.
A line in the order of service. Written down, read by anyone who wants to, said out loud by nobody.
A sentence in a speech. Usually the shortest one in the speech. People who have done it say the trick is to decide the exact words beforehand and not improvise.
A candle. Often lit during the ceremony rather than at the reception.
Nothing visible at all. A real choice, and not a failure to honour anyone.
The case for nothing visible
Worth stating plainly, because most writing on this assumes you want a gesture and only helps you pick one.
A visible memorial changes the room. It asks every guest to hold something for a moment, including the guests who were closest to the person and may still be finding the day hard. Some families want exactly that. Others find that a chair nobody is allowed to sit in becomes the thing everyone is looking at.
If you are not sure, the question that tends to sort it is not "what would they have wanted" but "who is in the room, and what will this ask of them". You are allowed to decide that the answer is a private one.
If you do leave a seat, tell the people running the day
This is the practical half, and it is the part that goes wrong.
An empty chair at a laid table looks like a no-show. Left unexplained, the venue will try to fix it: someone will quietly clear the place setting, or a coordinator will offer the seat to a guest who is standing, or the caterer will count it as a meal that got cancelled. None of that is carelessness. They are doing their job with the information they have.
So if you leave a seat, three people need to know before the day: whoever is running the room, whoever is doing the catering count, and whoever is on the door with the seating list. One sentence to each is enough. You do not owe anyone an explanation beyond "that seat stays as it is".
The same applies to a photograph on a side table. Tell the venue it is staying there, or it will be tidied.
Saying it once, in writing
It is easier not to have this conversation 5 separate times with 5 different suppliers, and having it once in writing is easier than having it once out loud.
If you are using The Table Plan, you can mark the seat on the floor plan so it is deliberate rather than a gap, and write what you have decided in a private note that is never printed and never appears on the share link.
There are some suggested wordings for a memorial card, offered as conventions people already use rather than as the right answer. The one listed first does not name anybody, so a couple who has not told their guests does not have to read past the others to find it.
The bit that has nothing to do with seating
Whatever you choose, decide it early and write it down, because the version of you sorting the seating plan 3 weeks before the wedding has more patience for this than the version of you doing it the night before. That is the only advice here that holds regardless of what you decide.
The conventions around the top table and who sits where, including when to depart from them, are covered in wedding seating plan etiquette.