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When Lynn Ford meets you at her door, you would never guess the agony she carries with her. Her eyes are bright and she seems bursting with energy. "Come in! Get yourself out of that rain! Come through. I'm just in the middle of washing up."

Andrew's picture in the living room

Today would have been her son Andrew's 25th birthday, but Andrew died when a chip pan fire destroyed the family home, two and a half years ago. Lynn slips a DVD into her player and sits to watch the film she has just made with the Fire Brigade about that dreadful, hated night. The footage is shocking, showing footage taken by firefighters inside the burning house, where she now knows her son lay dead.

As she watches, the weight of her loss begins to show on Lynn's face, her body sagging slightly into itself. "I cried so much, when I first watched this." She says, "Some of my family haven't seen it yet."

For weeks after the tragedy, Lynn found sleep all but impossible, waking up through the night, crying; pacing the bedroom floor, thinking about the son she had lost so suddenly and so unfairly.

Lynn's home after the fire

But one night, around six weeks after Andrew's death, something happened. "I couldn't cope with the pain I was feeling. I'd wake up in the early hours of the morning just thinking about him, and things were going around in my head and I thought, 'I'm going to have to write it down. If I write it down on paper, it's not building up inside of me.' So I got a pen and paper and I started to write a few lines."

Over the following months, the poetry kept coming and soon, Lynn had a book. Now she has decided to use the book to help others avoid her son's fate. Cleveland Fire Brigade runs a campaign to get old fashioned chip pans banned and swaps people's pans for modern, thermostatically controlled deep fryers. Lynn's book, Poetry of Tears, goes on sale in June 2008, with all proceeds going to Cleveland Fire Brigade's campaign.

"I mean, the thing is, in this day and age, with modern technology, there is no need to have an old fashioned chip-pan. There are deep fat fryers and they've been around for years and they're thermostatically controlled and I did have one and the reason we'd turned to the old fashioned chip pan, it had been shoved in a cupboard and had never been used for years. The deep fat fryer, which we'd had for a number of years, had broken down, so Andrew, one night, had just pulled out the chip pan from the cupboard."