[Apologies for the personal and lengthy introduction to this post.

When a person who is close to us, or as many of us know, a pet, dies, even when the death is expected, we feel not only sadness and loss but a profound sense of disruption. We stop, cry, and dwell on the significant change that has occurred in our reality. Most people have felt a less intense version of this response when the death is of someone they’ve only known through media – a favorite actor or actress, musical artist or person in the news. Scholars have labelled the indirect “interactions” and “relationships” we have with these people parasocial rather than social, a form of presence in which we overlook the fact that our experience with them is entirely mediated. In the age of social media, the sense that you are close to a person you’ve never met and who doesn’t know you can be much more powerful. Yesterday I was one of the many people who experienced this sense of sadness, loss and disruption following the news that Sydney Towle had died. In retrospect I shouldn’t have been, but I was surprised by the intensity of my own response to the news.

The obituary from the New York Times below describes Sydney’s life and contributions as a social media influencer with a rare cancer. But her impact, and the impact of her passing on people who never met her, is best represented by the outpouring of reactions.

In a comment at the end of the obituary, the reporter wrote:

“In the few hours since this obituary was published, I have heard from so many readers who are distraught about the death of someone they knew only through the internet. But that was part of Sydney’s power. In sharing her daily struggles and triumphs on TikTok, she built bonds with thousands — hundreds of thousands — of strangers and changed the way we think about how someone with cancer should live her life.”

A story on the entertainment and lifestyle website Bollywood Shaadis included this:

“Sydney, who had more than one million followers, received heartfelt messages for her and her family. One user wrote, ‘The most beautiful person changed forever by her sunshine!!!! This is unfathomably unfair. Sending so much love to her & her family and people.’

Another commented, ‘Be at peace, angel. Also, I’d like to mention to people in the comments that parasocial relationships can cause real grief. Even though most of us did not know Syd, It’s OK to let ourselves be really sad. Allow the tears and take it slow. My deepest condolences to her friends and family, and big gratitude to Syd for sharing the most intimate parts of her life with the world. You made a real difference, sunshine girl.’

A third user penned, ‘I think I speak for so many people when I say Sydney changed our lives. Every moment with her felt like a warm hug and despite what she has been going through for the last 3 years, she never failed to exude positivity and hope to all of those around her. She is a one in a million human and I am so grateful to know her. Rest easy, Squid; we love you so so so much.’”

Three comments from my Facebook feed highlight the intensity of the parasocial connection:

“I have seen a lot of heartbreak and sadness in my sixty plus years on this planet. A lot of it having to do with the dreadful disease of cancer. Family. Friends. Fellow workers. It really doesn’t matter who you are. A few years ago I came across an “influencer” as she was called on social media. She was 23 and newly diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. Stage 4. To a lot of people that news is alone is a death sentence. Not for Sydney Towle. Or as her millions of followers call her, Syd. She took that news as a reason to fight. A reason to live life. She traveled around the world in between chemo appointments. She volunteered for every medical trial in order to find a cure. She lived her life as a positive influence for anyone who was unfortunate to suffer this devastating disease. People followed her for encouragement. Her fight was contagious. She raised awareness. She raised money. And she reminded everyone you are never too young to get cancer why pushing early diagnosis. She was a normal young woman, with a not normal version of an all too common disease. Syd passed away last night surrounded by her family. Surrounded by the millions who followed her daily doses of hope, and determination. Her favorite saying was ‘just keep swimming’. This is the legacy that she will leave us, just keep swimming. Rest easy Sydney. Sympathies to her loving mom and brother, who were there on her all too short journey. If you proved anything in your 26 years on this planet, it was that angels truly do walk among us.”

“This is the very first time I have ever cried over the passing of a consent creator. I was hopeful that the new treatment she was going through was gonna help her get better. I cannot even begin to express how much I am going to miss her. Fly high sweet angel.”

“Today I cried for someone I’ve never met.
When I learned Sydney Towle had died my heart broke. Ive followed her for the past 3 years. She almost felt like family to me.
Maybe grief isn’t measured by how long we’ve known someone.
Maybe it’s measured by witnessing another human so fully that their story touches something inside of us.
I don’t really have an explanation.
I just know my heart is grieving today.
Sydney… thank you for sharing your life so openly, for bringing awareness to so many, and for reminding us what courage and love can look like in the face of unimaginable circumstances. Your life has touched millions of people, grateful I’m one of them.
I will miss your upbeat lively personality- a stranger that will always have a piece of my heart! Fly high with the angels pretty girl. I’m going to miss you tremendously. R.I.P. Sydney Towle“

For more about Sydney, follow the links in the obituary, see the press coverage from Bollywood Shaadis, E! Online or the many other outlets that featured it, and find her on social media. –Matthew]

Sydney Towle, Who Chronicled Her Cancer on TikTok, Dies at 26

For an audience that grew to more than a million followers, she challenged assumptions about how people with serious illnesses should look and live.

By Katherine Rosman
August 6, 2026

Sydney Towle, a social media memoirist who mixed anguish, optimism and unabashed wanderlust as she challenged TikTok viewers to reconsider how a cancer patient should look and live, died on Wednesday at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. She was 26.

Her death, from complications of metastatic bile duct cancer, was announced on her social media channels. Earlier this week, her family said that she had entered hospice care.

In 2023, Ms. Towle, a recent graduate of Dartmouth, was living in Los Angeles — working at a remote-office marketing job, surfing and posting bikini selfies and dance-trend videos online — when a bulge and a burning sensation in her belly landed her in urgent care. Soon after, she was diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma, a rare cancer of the bile ducts.

Ms. Towle turned her new life as a young woman with cancer into content. For an audience that grew to more than a million followers, she created videos showing herself hiking in Spain, sharing her loneliness and, with her mother, wrapping her head in ice packs to help prevent hair loss from chemotherapy.

Meshing the realities of a deadly disease with a thirst for life, she brought her large following with her as she juggled illness and enriching experiences. She had surgery to remove her gall bladder and part of her liver — and once she got the OK from a doctor, took off for a solo adventure in Europe. Through it all, she recorded and posted.

Her focus as an influencer shifted to persuading a large audience to reconsider the culture’s assumptions about people with serious illnesses.

“Syd had a keen sense of how sharing her life could help others, and she used that to promote understanding of young adults facing cancer, the importance of research funding and the beauty of living life in the moment,” Melinda Bachini, the chief patient officer of the Cholangiocarcinoma Foundation, said in an interview.

In a video Ms. Towle posted last year, she dances in her apartment with a caption splayed across the screen: “Go get a pint of Ben and Jerry’s, watch your favorite movie, remember that life is good and bad things happen sometimes but that doesn’t make it a bad life.”

In her, the internet had a new avatar of an emerging face of cancer: younger than expected; feeling reasonably upbeat despite a dire diagnosis; able and eager to have normal life experiences between treatments and hospitalizations.

More than many others on “CancerTok,” Ms. Towle managed to blend lifestyle content (“get ready with me” and fashion “haul” videos) with dispatches from the chemo bay, where she might pose with an IV pole and a vomit bag against the thump of a trending hip-hop song.

But she also posted poignant monologues about the toll of fighting for your life at the very time that most of your peers are building theirs. Dating, she explained in a melancholy post, was out of reach.

“How do you make small talk about what you’ve been up to,” she said in one video, “when what you’ve been up to is going to chemotherapy?”

In the fall of 2024, after a recurrence of the cancer in her liver, Ms. Towle moved to New York City for treatment at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. She noted the occasion with a video showing herself cheerfully dancing on a city street, as Taylor Swift’s “Welcome to New York” played.

But just as Ms. Towle was relocating, a band of online trolls convened on Reddit with the express purpose of skeptically dissecting her online posts — her words, mood, clothing, hair and signs of illness.

“Does something feel off to you about Syd Towle’s cancer story?” one of the most prolific posters wrote.

“We have receipts, medical analysis, fact-checking and discussions,” the anonymous poster added, urging people to “join the conversation and tell us how you found us and why you may have doubts.”

Intent on exposing what they said was likely a giant fraud, the Reddit posters questioned the medical details that Ms. Towle shared online, finding bogus “evidence” of a conspiracy and mocking her every move. Some reached out to the brands she had deals with to urge them to drop her. Someone using an anonymous email account even messaged her medical providers.

“I literally feel like punching her in the face,” wrote one commenter.

Ms. Towle was tormented by the accusations and harassment, but never publicly engaged with the conspiracy theorists. Instead, she continued to make the videos that had become her emotional lifeline.

Her story, including an account of the barrage of online abuse, was chronicled in a front-page article in The New York Times in May 2025. “I’m sorry that they are so angry that living with cancer can look different than they think it should,” she said.

Sydney Elizabeth Towle was born on Nov. 15, 1999, in Newburyport, Mass., to Elizabeth Morrow and Philip Towle, and grew up in Hobe Sound, Fla.

She majored in government and environmental studies at Dartmouth, and graduated in 2022.

Her father died in 2016. In addition to her mother, she is survived by a brother, Austin.

“She put herself in front of the camera at the most difficult time in her life and told people that it’s OK not to be OK,” her brother said in an interview. “As she said so many times, ‘You’ve got to just keep swimming.’”

Even when her cancer recurrence spurred a move to the East Coast, she managed to find the bright side. “I’ve always wanted to live in New York City,” she said in a video, “and life is short, as I’m constantly reminded.”

Though heavy-hearted about leaving the friends she had made in Los Angeles, she identified the gift in that sadness.

“I was just thinking,” she said, “about that quote: ‘How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.’”