Parents can get used to sleeping little, to recognizing their child’s cry among a hundred voices, and to staying awake until they hear the key in the door. They can continue to see their daughter as the girl who ran around the house, even though she is now a woman. What they should never get used to is saying her name in the past tense.
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Isabella Belmar Naranjo was twenty years old. She was a dentistry student, daughter, sister, and friend. Her life was just beginning to unfold. She had affections, projects, and that age when there is still time to make mistakes, start over, and become several times in one life.
Isabella died on December 28, 2023, after the overturning of the pickup truck she was traveling in on the route between Tomé and Concepción. It was not an incurable disease nor a death before which there was nothing left but to accept that medicine had reached its limit. Byron Alexander Hermosilla Lagos was driving drunk, without a license, and at a speed that was neither reasonable nor prudent for the road conditions. Isabella died at the scene.
When a death could have been avoided, grief becomes more heartbreaking. Anger is added to the sadness. The mind returns to what happened looking for a door to another outcome: what would have happened if Isabella had not gotten into that truck or if someone had stopped the driver. The “if only” is a cruel machine: it promises answers but only produces versions of an irretrievable life.
Guilt can appear even in those who had no responsibility. Parents ask themselves what they could have done differently. It is the last attempt to keep protecting a daughter when they can no longer do so: guilt preserves the fantasy of some control; helplessness does not even allow that consolation.
I am a psychologist, but also a friend of Isabella’s parents: Cristina Naranjo Concha, a dentist and employee of the Biobío Health Service, and Mauricio Belmar Polanco, a nutritionist and director of the CESFAM Rural Santa Fe in Los Ángeles. I know them, I have talked with them about Isabella, and I have seen up close part of what it means to keep living after losing a daughter. It is also from that place that I write this text.
Isabella’s family could not focus only on mourning her. They had to learn the language of restraining orders, hearings, postponements, credits, and substitute penalties. More than two years after her death, the trial began, after being rescheduled twice. In July 2026, Isabella would have turned twenty-three. Her parents should have been watching her blow out the candles. Instead, they had to sit in a court and hear again how she died.
The judicial process enters into grief and forces a return to the worst day of life. Each hearing reactivates the death. The parents face two cruel tasks: learning to live without their daughter and fighting for the world to understand that it could have been avoided.
Hermosilla was sentenced to four years in prison for driving drunk causing death, without having obtained a license. However, since he had already spent some time in jail, the sentence was replaced by four years of intensive supervised freedom. Legally there was a conviction, but grief does not speak in legal language. Hearing “four years in prison” and discovering that it will be served in freedom can feel like a second fall.
The court calculates sentences, restraining orders, and credits; the parents calculate the Christmases that will be missed. They know they will no longer be able to accompany her to the altar if she ever decided to marry, nor gather around a table with the family she could have formed. They calculate all the everyday and extraordinary scenes of a life that should have continued but ended prematurely.
No sentence would have brought Isabella back. But when the answer seems insufficient, it opens a second wound, as if the lost life and the imposed penalty belonged to different scales. The file closes; the parents’ story does not.
It is in honor of Cristina and Mauricio that I write this, because a child should not die. There should not be a room that keeps their belongings while time continues to move forward. Nor clothes that hold a shape, a scent, or a story, but no longer have a body to inhabit. No parent should have to learn to live without someone who was supposed to outlive them.
When a daughter dies, not only is the girl or woman she was lost: all the women she could still have become are lost too. There will no longer be a graduation to attend, a profession to celebrate, nor the possibility of seeing her choose and build her own life. There will be no pending conversations, missing hugs, or photographs of a story her parents already imagined. It is not only her place at the table that is empty. The future is empty.
Grief shakes identity and forces rebuilding life around someone who is no longer there but continues to appear everywhere. Then comes loneliness: discovering that no one can enter the exact place where it hurts. Others can hug and cry with us, but not feel from within the absence we carry. That loneliness can become one of the cruelest forms of grief because the world goes on while, for the parents, the previous life has ended.
Over time, flowers wither, messages decrease, and visits stop coming. Parents may end up taking care of others from their pain: they say they are better and avoid saying their daughter’s name because the world no longer knows what to do with their sadness. But silence does not eliminate absence. Accompanying may not consist of finding words but in not leaving: tolerating silence and allowing Isabella’s name to appear without changing the subject.
Working through grief does not mean letting go of the one who died. A daughter is not a stage overcome. The bond changes form. Isabella remains in memories, photographs, and inner conversations. Saying her name allows death not to devour the twenty years that existed before.
Not everything happens for a reason nor does every tragedy leave a lesson. Sometimes a tragedy is simply a tragedy. Seeking meaning is preventing death from having the last word. Isabella was much more than a victim: she was a daughter, sister, friend, and student. Her life did not fit inside a file.
Perhaps no sentence would have been enough, because there is no justice capable of giving back to her parents what they lost. But four years in freedom are hard to reconcile with an absence that will last a lifetime. Hermosilla can serve a sentence; Isabella’s parents never finish serving theirs.
Sweet Isabella. A child should not die. And when it happens, the least the world can do is not ask their parents to forget nor confuse the closing of a legal case with the end of their grief. Because a sentence can close a process, but it does not close an absence.
