The late actor Cameron Boyce‘s mother Libby is reflecting on the six-plus years that have passed since her son died suddenly at 20.

Libby, a longtime social worker and president of the Cameron Boyce Foundation, opened up to PEOPLE about her journey with grief in the years since Cameron’s death after experiencing a seizure in his sleep in June 2019.

“Grief never goes away, you know. It’s always sort of right in the shadows,” Libby says. “I always say, right here all the time. So it doesn’t really go away. It doesn’t really even lessen, frankly. I mean, it does obviously from the initial shock. But what I’ve learned more than anything is really cliché, but live for this moment and you never know.”

Cameron was a young actor best known for his performances in several Disney Channel programs and Adam Sandler‘s Grown Ups movies, in which he portrayed Sandler’s onscreen son. For Libby, the trauma she experienced after Cameron’s death “changes how you view death, it changes how you proceed in the world.”

“He and I had an extremely close relationship, so I know what he would be thinking. I know what he would want me to do,” Libby says of her son. “I know he’d want me to be a badass and go out and do all these things. So I try and I just kind of keep him with me. But yeah, it’s not easy. It’s horrific. But you have to go on. You can’t just go to bed and never wake up. You gotta keep going.”

Cameron’s life and legacy received renewed public attention in July when Sandler, 58, paid tribute to Cameron in Happy Gilmore 2 by using his likeness in the background of a brief scene. Libby says that Sandler reaches out to the Boyce family — she and husband Victor share daughter Maya, who is also an actor — “a couple times a year just to see how [Victor is] doing and say, ‘Hey,’ and that he is thinking about us.”

“It’s more special because he thought of this, not so much to do with the movie, just that Adam still thinks about Cameron and obviously holds him in high regard, because he could, he could have anything in the background,” Libby says of Sandler’s tribute to her son. “That’s very special to us, and it kind of speaks to the fact that — the further it gets away from his passing, people don’t know who he is. We’d like to think he had a strong impact on the world. And it’s extremely sad that he’s still not here, but to know that he’s remembered fondly, especially [by] people he worked with and hired him and worked with him and said, ‘Oh my God, this kid’s really special.’ That’s the nice part.”

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Libby, who tells PEOPLE she is retiring from her career as a social worker after more than three decades in September, says she is eager to continue spending her time caring for her family as fervently as her son once did.

“Taking care of his sister and his dad, that’s what he was about, taking care of his family and his friends,” Libby says. “So I’m the one who does that now. We did it together and now it’s on me.”