Vachon Imagined

Yesterday, while walking through Riverbanks Zoo with my family, I came upon a statue called Beauty and Butterfly. It was dedicated to a young girl named Olivia Grace Mazzelli. The inscription read:

“Whose spirit soars with the butterflies and whose smile forever brightens our hearts. May her light guide others toward hope, love, and a cure for childhood cancer.”

I stood before that statue and let it walk through me.

That is what consciousness allows when we stop resisting it. It moves through us, if we give it permission.

The statue portrayed a little girl smiling as she held a butterfly. I never met Olivia, yet in that moment I felt that I wasn’t meant to know her story as much as I was meant to receive what her life was still communicating.

Cancer entered my thoughts—not simply as disease, but as one of the many ways life reveals both its fragility and its mystery. We search for causes. We pursue cures. We should. Yet beneath every explanation remains something deeper: life itself, expressing joy and suffering, birth and death, beauty and loss.

The butterfly was not the message. Neither was the statue.

They were invitations.

Invitations to witness a life without trying to possess it.

We are so accustomed to owning everything we encounter. We want to own the story, the meaning, the grief, the spirit. Yet we were never asked to own any of it. We were only asked to hold space while life passes through us.

To witness without separating ourselves from what we see.

To love without immediately explaining.

To remain present before interpretation begins.

Standing there, I realized that monuments are not built to preserve the past. They are built to awaken something in the present.

Olivia’s life did not end with a statue. Her story continued the moment a stranger stood before it and allowed compassion, tenderness, and humility to pass through his own heart.

That is how stories continue.

Not because we possess them, but because we become transparent enough for them to move through us, changing the atmosphere around us and quietly giving others permission to do the same.