Andrew and I met the way many great love stories quietly begin, at work. He was a civil engineer, I was a landscape architect, and we found ourselves on the same projects in the same office, day after day. What started as professional collaboration slowly became something neither of us expected. We fell in love.

For a while, we kept it to ourselves — tucked away from colleagues and management, a secret smile between two people who knew something good was happening. But the moment I left that company, Andrew didn’t hesitate. He wanted everyone to know. He was proud of us, proud of what we’d built together. Even now, that memory makes me smile every time I think of it.

Long before I knew him as anything more than a colleague, Andrew had already told me about his first battle with melanoma. He was just 23 when, after a business trip to Africa, a mole was discovered on the back of his neck. It turned out to be a melanoma. He underwent surgery to remove it, along with the surrounding lymph nodes and muscle tissue. And then — he was fine. For 23 years, cancer was simply something that had happened to him once, not something that defined him.

By the time we fell in love, that chapter felt like ancient history. We had both come through divorce, both learned what it meant to rebuild, and together we found something steady and good. For eight years, we were happy. I remember thinking, honestly believing, that life was finally getting easier for both of us.

In late August 2026, we took a road trip to New Brunswick to visit his family. In early September, we celebrated my birthday. Life felt full and unremarkable in the best way — the kind of ordinary happiness you don’t realize you’re memorizing until later.

Then, in late September, Andrew started feeling sick — vomiting, stomach pain that wouldn’t let up. An ultrasound found nothing. We told ourselves it was work stress and didn’t think much more about it. But over the following months, he wasn’t getting better. He was losing weight. Worry crept in, quiet at first, then impossible to ignore.

On January 30th, 2026, we finally went to the emergency room. That’s when we learned the truth: cancer had returned, now in his liver and small intestines. He began immunotherapy. After the second round, his health declined rapidly. His liver and kidneys began to fail.

On April 22nd, 2026, we lost him.

The world lost a brilliant engineer. His parents lost a son they were endlessly proud of. And I lost my partner — the person I built a quiet, imperfect, deeply happy life with.

I’m sharing Andrew’s story not as a cautionary tale, but simply because it’s his story — and because melanoma doesn’t always follow the path we expect. 23 years after his first diagnosis, with no sign of recurrence, cancer returned — not on his skin, but in his liver and small intestines. There was nothing that could have predicted it, nothing that could have prevented it. Andrew was, simply, unlucky.

What I want people to take from this isn’t a warning — it’s a tribute. Andrew faced illness twice in his life, seventeen years apart, with the same quiet courage both times. He built a full, happy life in between — a career he was proud of, a family who loved him, and a relationship that

brought both of us joy we didn’t expect to find again. That life mattered, regardless of how it ended.

I miss Andrew.

Tribute by Yue Ma.

If you or someone you know is navigating the loss of a loved one to melanoma, Melanoma Canada offers a Facebook Grief Support Group to help connect individuals who understand. If you would like to share your story, we would also love to hear from you. Please reach out to us at support@melanomacanada.ca.