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 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.’”
