A father's diary of grief: Day 16

Barranquilla, Colombia, February 17th, 2026

Carnaval Enlutecido

Nearly nine months ago, I reserved a room at the Howard Johnson in Barranquilla for the weekend of Carnaval. I’m now writing from the room I reserved. It faces east, toward the Magdalena River. There is a parallelogram of morning sun on the tile floor.

I chose the Howard Johnson in large part because it offered refundable rates for the weekend. Most hotels in town do not. And for a time it appeared we might take advantage of that refund, as our 21-year-old daughter Juliana was not doing well back home.

And then, not two weeks before the first parade, Juliana decided to end her life. A decision that caused all manner of disorientation, but one specific element involved these plans to attend Carnaval. It is, as one attendee described to us, Colombia’s biggest party. In a nation that knows how to party. Should we, a mother and father en luto, in mourning, take part?

We did. And we do not regret it. For sure, it was a weekend marked by difficult moments. In my travels through Colombia I have photographed nearly every street cat — gato callejero — to send to Juliana. We happened upon one just down the street from the Howard Johnson, lying in front of a hospital of all places. I did not take a picture. There were many such moments where a sight reminded us of her.

But Carnaval also served as a reminder that we are still alive, that we are not done transforming experiences into memories. We will carry that feeling of loss everywhere we go, but we can pack it up with our sunscreen and garishly colored garments and take it places we’ve never been. Accumulate the kind of stories that might at one point in our lives included Juliana as a character, and at other points would be tales we’d tell her. They will still be stories worth telling.

Our tickets to the main Carnaval parades indicated a list of prohibited items. This being Colombia, one can infer that said items are in fact ubiquitous. One of them was espuma. A mild soapy foam. Sold in skinny spray cans for 10,000 pesos (about $2.75). I had no intention of buying a spray can but a Venezuelan refugee came along and recounted his life story to me, a story involving displacement and prison and losing everything he had. So I bought a can. And I proceeded to use it. Spraying my neighbors as they sprayed me.

It was all quite ridiculous. It was fun. And you should see the other guy.

“What more could you have done?”

So asked a well-meaning colleague. We were fortunate to have been in a position to do a lot for Juliana. We had insurance that covered most of the treatments she tried, the medications, the medications to treat the side effects of other medications, inpatient care, outpatient care. We had family resources to enable Juliana to try things that insurance wouldn’t cover. We flew her across the country twice to be treated in Massachusetts. Beyond the mere facilitation and paying the bills, we had been there for her, she had been living at home at an age when most of her peers were off at college. We went to her beer-league hockey games. We did her laundry. We encouraged her, when she began to lament falling behind her peers, that there are many paths to a meaningful life.

But ask that question — what more could you have done — and a list begins that might never end. For unless you’ve devoted your entire waking life to a person, there is always something more you could have done. Last week my mind returned to an article David Frum wrote about the loss of his own daughter, about his own unease with the thoughts of things that he might have done. Frum’s daughter Miranda succumbed to complications arising from a brain tumor discovered in 2018.

I pondered the “moments of self-reproach” that Frum described as part of his grief process. And I thought, Frum had it easy. It wasn’t David Frum who planted the tumor in Miranda’s brain. But when it is thoughts and feelings, rather than a tumor, that have taken root in a brain, that have directly or indirectly led to unbearable physical symptoms, you can’t help but think did I put those there? Could I have taken them out?

More fundamental than the question “what more could you have done” is “could anything you possibly might have done have made a difference in the outcome?” And with this second question the thought process is a little easier to stomach.

Last father’s day, Juliana had given me a water-color, derived from a portrait we had taken at a father-daughter dance thirteen years before. Today, it’s one of my most prized possessions. What haunts me, though, is where I found it when I was back home last week. It was in a file drawer, alongside many other handmade cards the kids had given me over the years. A picture that deserves to be framed and hung on the wall, in a file drawer. And I thought to myself, now what kind of message did that send, that your daughter would put such time and effort into something so lovely and you just filed it away?

So there, an easy example of something more I could have done. Of course, had I framed it and hung it — perhaps on my office wall — it would have joined three more original Juliana artworks already there, that she had seen there. Would the fourth have been the charm? I could have done more, but it is far less certain that what I might have done would have made a difference.

The answer to these questions is simply not knowable. They cannot be resolved with a simple “yes” or “no.” The resolution, I suspect, comes from an understanding that there are still other beloved people in one’s life, people for whom one can indeed still make a difference, and should.