For Six Months After I Buried My Husband and Both My Children, My Family Sent Cheerful Group-Chat Messages and a Party Invitation as if Nothing Had Happened — Then My Name Hit the News Attached to $18.7 Million, and Suddenly Every One of Them Remembered My Number

Three months later, the spring sun lay warm across the brick terrace of the newly opened Maya and Rowan Larkin National Safety Center in downtown Richmond.

Across the lawn, dozens of young families had gathered for the center’s first truck-safety seminar.

Engineers were demonstrating new automatic-braking systems the foundation had helped fund — the very kind of technology that, on one ordinary morning on Interstate 95, might have kept a sleeping driver’s rig from ever crossing the median.

Child-safety advocates moved through the crowd handing out free car seats to parents who couldn’t otherwise afford them.

And beside the main doors, catching the morning light, hung a large bronze plaque, and on it were two relief portraits — a little girl with bright laughing eyes, and a small boy with a mischievous grin — above a single line: The Maya & Rowan Larkin Foundation.