Maddy Baloy, a content creator who documented her battle with terminal colon cancer on TikTok, died on May 1. She was 26.
“Maddy passed away peacefully last night,” Louis Risher told People May 2. “She is so special. I turned 27 yesterday, actually. I was holding her hand all day and that’s all I needed.”
He added that at the time of her passing, Maddy Baloy was “surrounded with love.”
She is also survived by her parents Carissa Talmege and Lucky Talmege and brother Dylan.
A teacher at Shore Acres Elementary in Florida, Maddy gained a following online through her candid documentation of her health journey, which began after her 2023 diagnosis. Feeling “so alone and isolated,” after receiving news she had at most five years to live, Maddy decided to share her life with the world.
“I knew I had a lot to say,” she explained to People in March. “‘My mind shifted, and I was like, ‘I am going to get every ounce of life that I can out of this.'”
Amassing nearly 500,000 followers across her social channels, Maddy’s most popular videos included a vulnerable January vlog of her coping with the news of her tumors growing by cooking as well as sharing her personal bucket list.
Among Maddy’s last wishes were to “convince at least one person to watch The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” to convince someone to stop dieting and to meet celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay.
Most of Maddy’s goals did come to fruition, including being wined and dined by the Hell’s Kitchen star himself at his Miami restaurant.
“The best night of my life!” Maddy wrote of the evening in a February Instagram post. “Thank you endlessly for giving the biggest yes, Chef.”
The influencer also achieved another bucket list item through the help of Taylor Lautner and Tay Lautner, by appearing on their podcast, The Squeeze. During the episode, Maddy explained why she went the direction she did with her online platform amid her illness.
“From the start I just wanted to be as open as I could be,” Maddy said on the Feb. 28 episode. “I didn’t quit anything when I got cancer—continuing my lifestyle of being a girl in her twenties—people think that is insane, but that’s who I was before.”