Is the death of a girlfriend's father a reasonable excuse for a student to miss a class? I just received an email from an undergrad student in a course that I am teaching.
The student informed me that his girlfriend's father passed away,
and so he will be unable to attend my class because
he &quot;needs to stay with her to help her with official processes related to her father's death&quot;.
(I am paraphrasing what he wrote.)
This is the first time that a student has raised this as a reason for missing a class.
Question:
Is the death of a girlfriend's father a reasonable excuse for a student to miss a class?
Here's how I am thinking about it:

The death of an immediate family member is a significant event.
If the student experienced the death of an immediate family member,
there's no question to me that this would be a reasonable excuse for missing a class.
However, in this case, it's not the student
who is experiencing the death of an immediate family member, but his girlfriend.
I understand that for university students,
a girlfriend/boyfriend can be extremely important.
I don't think my university policy allows a student to miss quizzes/exams
due to the death of a relative of the student's significant other,
so I am assuming that the same policy would apply for missing classes.
However, I have a nagging feeling that if I were to deny his request,
I would be a &quot;bad&quot; or &quot;unreasonable&quot; teacher.
(Note: I mistakenly wrote &quot;due to the death of the student's significant other&quot; earlier but I fixed this mistake.)

Response to comments/questions

Due to COVID-19, the course is run virtually using Zoom.

A few weeks before the start of the semester,
I inherited this course from a colleague
who received reducing teaching load
because he was assigned additional administrative tasks.
I am therefore trying to run the course how he set it up in the past.
The attendance policy which he set,
and is included in the syllabus,
is that if students miss 2 or more classes,
they will automatically fail the course.

In addition, students do receive a small amount of points
for attendance and participation.

The course is conducted using a seminar course format
rather than a traditional lecture format.
For all classes except the first class,
students present their work,
and other students ask questions and give feedback and suggestions.
Due to the seminar course format,
it makes some sense to me why my colleague required
a high level of attendance to pass the course.

I found what the university policy says
regarding excused absences for exams or coursework:

A death certificate and supporting documentation where there is a demonstrably close relationship between the student and the deceased.



What I learned and what I decided to do

Ultimately I decided to excuse the student from that particular class.
It was pointed out that attendance and participation
only counts for a very small number of marks
in the overall course assessment.
Therefore, I should not waste time and effort overthinking this issue.
(In the case where the student were absent for
an exam or major course assignment,
I would have to follow official procedures
to handle the student's issue.)
It was also pointed out that students
may be strongly emotionally affected
by events that occur not only to their immediate family
or to their married spouses,
but also to their significant others or close friends/relatives
or even their pets.
Finally, it is a hassle to take attendance,
so in future courses,
it would make my life easier and less stressful
if attendance was not considered in the course assessment.
Edit: see below for some additional thoughts following OP’s revision of the question.
Let me start with this basic premise: Your students are adults.
Let me repeat that: your students are adults. That is one of the great luxuries of teaching in a higher education setting: you get to spend your time and energy actually teaching the subjects you are passionate about and not having to worry about being some kind of glorified baby-sitter or beacon of moral rectitude for your students. The division of labor is clear: the students get to make to their own decisions about how they want to best benefit from the course you are teaching, and you get to test them, give out assignments of various sorts, and give a grade at the end of the semester that reflects your assessment of what they learned.
And now for your question:

Is the death of a girlfriend's father a reasonable excuse for a student to miss a class?

While it is tempting to answer with a simple “yes”, I think the more accurate answer is that it is meaningless to speak about a “reasonable excuse”. Quite simply, in the context of a lecture-based college class, you should not be in the business of policing the reasons for students’ absences, or indeed whether they are absent or not. So in that sense, any excuse is a “reasonable” excuse. But if that’s the case, of course the notion of an excuse loses all meaning, so we come back to what I said above.
I know that what I‘m saying here flies in the face of the reality that some instructors mandate attendance in lectures, and that you do as well. Well, I have nothing more to say other than that such mandates are misguided and pointless, and lead to precisely the kind of fake dilemmas of the sort presented in your question, in which a baffled instructor tries to wrap their head around whether something is a “reasonable excuse”.
Finally, from a practical point of view, since you inherited this course from a colleague and don’t seem to personally have a strong attachment to the mandated attendance requirement, the best course of action is to simply drop that requirement, and free up your and your students’ time and energy for more productive uses.

Edit: OP has edited the question to clarify that the course is “conducted using a seminar course format rather than a traditional lecture format. For all classes except the first class, students present their work, and other students ask questions and give feedback and suggestions.”
For such a course, an attendance requirement may be logical. I’d still advocate for the instructor to make every effort possible not to get dragged into having to adjudicate questions about what is a “reasonable excuse” for missing class. It’s simply not a healthy situation for an instructor to be in and again conflicts with my “students are adults” premise. What I suggest instead is to have a policy that “students may not miss more than X lectures”, without making a distinction between “excused” and “not excused” absences, and to set X at a number that’s high enough that the policy won’t hurt students who had “serious” problems like an illness or a death in the family. For example X=4 or 5 would be pretty reasonable for a course of the type OP is describing. With such a policy, again the instructor will be treating the students as the adults that they are and freeing up everyone’s time and energy to let them do what they are actually at university to do instead of quibbling over bureaucratic nonsense.