09/02/2026
Do you know grief?
I donât mean, have you ever been sad.
I meanâdo you truly KNOW grief?
Has it ever consumed you like crashing waves in the ocean?
The first wave hits, and youâre stunned. You can barely process what is happening. Fear. Sadness. Emptiness. Disbelief.
Then the second wave comes. And the third. And the fourth.
And eventually, you get angry.
You get so angry that your body and mind are being battered by something you cannot stop. You fight against it. You beg for it to stop. You desperately search for somethingâanythingâto hold onto.
Then another wave hits, and this time youâre just exhausted.
Exhausted from fighting.
Exhausted from hurting.
Exhausted from trying to understand something that will never make sense.
For a moment, you wonder if you can keep doing this.
But then more waves come, and somehow you realize you have no choice.
You have to KEEP FIGHTING.
You have to keep searching for the shore. You have to keep your head above water, even when you donât know which direction the shore is anymore.
Giving up is not an option.
But continuing feels almost impossible.
So you exist somewhere in betweenâtoo exhausted to keep fighting, but unwilling to stop.
That is grief.
Those are the stages of grief I have experienced since losing my brother.
And this is grief that my family should never have had to experience.
But what makes our grief even harder to carry is knowing that, under Florida law, our loss is treated differently from someone elseâs.
Our pain is no less real.
Our grief is no less devastating.
And the person we are grieving was no less valuable.
So I continue to ask one question:
Why should Florida law have the power to say that one familyâs grief, pain and loss deserve access to justice, while another familyâequally devastated, equally brokenhearted, grieving someone equally importantâdoes not?
That is what Floridaâs wrongful-death medical malpractice lawâwhat so many families have come to call the âFree Killâ lawâdoes.
It draws a line between grieving families.
If the person who died does not fit into the right legal category, surviving family members can be barred from justice â even when medical negligence caused the death.
Think about that.
The scales of justice are supposed to be blind.
Yet when someone dies because of medical negligence in Florida, their age, marital status, and whether they had certain surviving family members can determine whether their loved ones can seek accountability for the human loss they suffered.
A life should not have to fit inside a tiny legal box before the people who loved that person are allowed meaningful access to justice.
And when families cannot realistically pursue these cases, the consequences reach beyond compensation.
Accountability matters.
Transparency matters.
Tracking patterns of negligence matters.
Patient safety matters.
Every family should have the opportunity to ask what happened, present the evidence, and let our justice system decide the outcome.
The law should not decide that some lives and some families are worthy of that opportunity while others are not.
Someone once described grief in a way I will never forget:
Grief is like glitter.
You never completely get rid of it.
Years from now, you will still find little specks of it in places you never expected. A song. A photograph. A smell. A joke. An empty chair. A memory that suddenly takes you right back to the person you lost.
I know I will carry those specks of grief for Gerald for the rest of my life.
But there is another layer to my grief.
Knowing his death could have been prevented.
Knowing it did not have to happen.
Knowing we will spend the rest of our lives without him.
And then learning that the very justice system I believed existed to protect families like mine could essentially tell us:
Your grief does not count the same.
That makes it so much harder to find the beautiful memories underneath all that glitter.
Geraldâs death was not fair.
A law that treats grieving families differently is not fair.
Having families cry out for change year after year and feel unheard is not fair.
And putting legal values on the loss of human life is not justice.
Gerald was not a category.
He was not a marital status.
He was not an age.
He was not a diagnosis.
He was not a box to check on a legal form.
He was a son.
He was a brother.
He was an uncle.
He was deeply loved.
He was a human being.
And his life mattered.
Our family will continue searching for the shore.
We will continue fighting through the waves.
And as long as Florida law tells even one grieving family that their loss matters less than another familyâs loss, I will continue using my voice.
Because justice should be blind.
Not selective.
