Annick, and the Beauty of a Life Lived Fully

There are some people who leave this world and the grief is straightforward. It is terrible, of course. It hurts. We miss them. We remember them. And then there are people whose deaths seem to demand something more from us. They make us stop. They make us look harder at the life that was lived and the life that remains.

Annick Pyfferoen was one of those people for me.

Annick understood something that the rest of us spend much of our lives trying to learn: that being alive is not the same thing as simply continuing to exist. She lived in Brussels, in Montreal, and in the United States. She worked. She cared for people. She learned. She loved. She raised a son. She cultivated plants and flowers. She spent time outside. She moved her body. She found her way into nature again and again.

And then cancer came and not just any cancer, de novo Stage IV Metastatic Breast Cancer (MBC). But even there, Annick refused to allow the disease to become the story of her life. Her son published the obituary she wrote herself, which begins with deceptively simple statements:

I lived.

I loved.

I was loved.

And then: I died.

There is something almost startling in that simplicity. No grand narrative. No attempt to make death prettier than it is. No insistence that everything happens for a reason, just the truth.

I lived.

I loved.

I was loved.

I died.

That was Annick. There was an awe inspiring courage in the way she allowed herself to be vulnerable. Not performatively vulnerable. Not the carefully curated vulnerability we sometimes offer one another because we know it will be received well but real vulnerability. The kind that says: This is hard. The kind that admits fear and uncertainty and tenderness. The kind that recognizes that needing other people is not weakness.

Annick understood that genuine intimacy requires vulnerability. She said so plainly; truly listen with curiosity and be vulnerable. That sounds simple. It isn’t. Most of us spend an enormous amount of energy protecting ourselves from exactly that kind of openness. Annick didn’t and perhaps that is one of the most profound gifts she leaves behind.

She participated in so many different parts of Project Life, many of which I was privileged to be part of as well and that matters a great deal to me because Project Life is about more than living with and through MBC. It is about creating space for the whole person who was living inside the diagnosis. It is about connection and honesty and the possibility of having a life even while living with something that will take it away. Annick showed up at Project Life and everywhere as herself. Not as a diagnosis, not as a patient, not as a cautionary tale. As Annick.

There was also something deeply intentional about the way she approached the choices that cancer forced upon her. She understood that more treatment is not automatically more living and when she was ready to be done, she calmly did that too.

That distinction matters.

When your life is measured in treatment cycles, scans, appointments, side effects and probabilities, it can become very easy to confuse the length of life with the quality of life. To believe that the only acceptable choice is the one that might buy another few weeks or months, regardless of what those weeks or months actually look like.

Annick was willing to ask the harder questions. What makes this life worth living? What do I want my days to contain? What am I willing to give up for more time, and what am I not?

Those are not easy questions. They require honesty. They require vulnerability and they require a willingness to recognize that quality of life is not some lesser consideration that comes after survival. It is life.

Annick cared about how she lived. She cared about being present. She cared about her body and what it could do. She cared about movement and exercise and the physical experience of being alive. She cared about nature and she cared about beauty.

You could see it on her porch, where she often sat during the many Zoom meetings. There were flowers and plants everywhere, tended by someone with a genuine green thumb and an eye for the small miracles that happen when you pay attention. Her porch was not merely decorated. It was cultivated.

That feels important because tending a plant requires a particular kind of faith. You put something into soil. You water it. You give it sunlight. You wait. You notice when something is struggling. You adjust. You celebrate the new growth. You accept that some things bloom beautifully and briefly, while others surprise you by returning year after year.

Annick knew something about that and she surrounded herself with living things. And perhaps there is no better metaphor for the way she moved through the world. She noticed. She nurtured. She cared. She loved.

Her love for her son, Sidney, was at the center of everything. Her words about him are among the most beautiful parts of the obituary, not because they are sentimental, but because they are so completely clear about what motherhood meant to her. She described becoming his mother as the absolute best part of her life. A miracle. A gift. An honor.

But what strikes me most is that she understood that loving a child is not about possessing them. She knew Sidney was his own person. Her role was to walk beside him. To share what she understood. To guide him toward figuring out who he was and what he wanted. And then, ultimately, to let him become himself.

That is love without ownership. Love with open hands and what a gift that is to a child. She wanted more time with him. Of course she did. She was angry that cancer had not given her more time. She was allowed that anger. She was allowed the unfairness of it. She did not need to turn death into a lesson in gratitude to make her life meaningful because her life already was meaningful.

She knew that life can be brutally cruel and astonishingly beautiful at the same time. Both things can be true. Cancer can steal someone far too soon and that person can still have lived a life full of love. A porch full of flowers. A body strong enough to hike and dance and lift. A quiet moment beneath the stars. A lake, a mountain, a walk, a son. Friends, colleagues; people whose lives she touched and who, in turn, touched hers.

This is the part of Annick’s story that I don’t want us to lose. She did not simply endure, she participated and engaged. She loved people. She cared for people. She learned from people. She gave something of herself to each person who crossed her path, and she asked them to give something back; not necessarily in grand gestures, but in genuine moments.

Listen. Be curious. Say what needs to be said. Be vulnerable. Go outside. Feel your body. Let the sun touch your skin. Stand beneath the stars. Breathe. Remember that we are tiny and insignificant and, somehow, completely connected to everything.

There is an almost radical tenderness in that way of looking at the world and I think that is how we honor Annick.

Not by trying to make sense of her death. Not by saying she lost a battle she never agreed to fight on those terms. Not by reducing her to the small part of her life that included living with cancer. We honor her by living a little more deliberately, by saying the important thing before it becomes the unsaid thing and by listening, really listening. By allowing ourselves to be vulnerable with someone we love. By making choices based not merely on how much life we can squeeze out of a calendar, but on what kind of life we are actually living. By going outside, noticing the flowers, tending something. By letting beauty matter and loving our children fiercely while remembering that they belong to themselves. By understanding that life is not made meaningful because it lasts forever; it is made meaningful because we were here.

Annick was here. She lived. She loved. She was loved and now she is gone. But I don’t think that means she has disappeared. Not entirely. She is in Sidney. She is in the people who learned something from her. She is in the vulnerability she gave others permission to practice. She is in the flowers that will bloom because someone learned from her how much beauty can come from tending something carefully. She is in the porch, the trees, the water.

She is in the quiet places where we remember that we are only a small part of something impossibly large. And perhaps, if we are paying attention, she is in the moments when we stop rushing through our own lives long enough to actually inhabit them. Breathe in. Look around. Notice what is alive. Breathe out and live. Not halfway, not cautiously, not someday. Now.