When you lose a child, people often tell you that time will make things easier. I’m not sure that’s true. Time teaches you how to carry the loss, but it doesn’t make the loss any smaller.

I learned that after losing my son, Andrew, in a preventable crash.

Andrew wasn’t a case. He wasn’t a number on a piece of paper or a name in a court file. He was my son. He had a life, a personality, people who loved him, and a future that was suddenly taken away. As his mother, I felt an enormous responsibility to make sure the world didn’t forget that.

That became especially important every time I walked into a courtroom.

I have spent much of my career in the legal industry, so I understood the language and the processes. But knowing how the legal system works is very different from experiencing it as a grieving mother. Suddenly, I wasn’t looking at a case from the outside.

I was the client. I was the mother waiting for answers, trying to understand deadlines, procedures and decisions while carrying a grief that made simply getting through the day difficult.

And sometimes, it felt like the system wanted to turn Andrew into a case number.

That is one of the hardest things families experience after a sudden loss. When someone dies, particularly in a preventable crash, there can be so much focus on paperwork, legal requirements and timelines that the person at the center of it all can disappear.

But I refused to let that happen to Andrew.

I carried his memory with me into every courtroom. I thought about him when things became frustrating. I reminded myself why I was there when I felt exhausted and overwhelmed. I wasn’t just fighting for a legal outcome. I was standing there for my son.

Grief is exhausting on its own, but navigating a complicated system while grieving can feel like another full-time job. There are deadlines you don’t know about until they are suddenly urgent. There are processes that seem designed for paperwork rather than people. And there are moments when families can feel completely powerless.

Eventually, I realized that my experience could be used for something bigger than my own story. If I was struggling to understand what was happening, I knew other families must be struggling too. If I felt like I was fighting to keep Andrew’s name and story visible, other mothers were probably doing the same thing.

That realization became part of my mission.

My book, Citizen’s Prey, is about exposing some of the hidden realities families can face after sudden loss. But more than that, it is about giving people a voice.

I can’t bring Andrew back. Nothing I say or do can change that. What I can do is keep telling his story.

Because Andrew was more than the way he died.

He was my son.

And as long as I have a voice, I will keep making sure people remember him that way.

By Sarah Standifird, a nationally recognized voice on distracted driving and road safety reform.

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