Beloved teen Tik Tok star Zuza Beine dies at 14, but her videos on Instagram weren’t just cancer chronicles

Dubai: At 14, I was sulking about bad math grades and my bangs not sitting right. At 14, Zuza Beine was teaching 1.8 million strangers how to live — and, ultimately, how to die with brutal honesty.

This Wisconsin teenager, who spent most of her short life with acute myeloid leukemia, didn’t give us a carefully curated highlight reel.

No soft-focus selfies or faux-inspirational captions. Instead, Zuza’s Instagram or Tik Tok was a front-row seat to pain, chemo, scars, and the relentless grind of fighting cancer since she was three.

She made “GRWM” (Get Ready With Me) videos — not to hawk products, but to remind us that putting on lip gloss while your body is betraying you is as much an act of defiance as it is a beauty routine.

And here’s the kicker: Zuza wasn’t doing it for clicks or pity. She was doing it to pay forward whatever scraps of wisdom she had gathered in her 14 years.

While most adults fumble their way through wellness podcasts and self-help books, Zuza distilled it in one of her last videos: gratitude for the tiny things. Not yacht vacations. Not career milestones. The tiny things.

She was painfully candid too. “I’m constantly on pain medicine because my body hurts so, so, so bad,” she said days before she died. Another post? “I can barely walk right now I’m in so much pain.” Imagine being that raw at an age when your biggest worry should be what sneakers to wear to school.

And yet, her feed was never just about despair. It was about daring to live fully in the worst circumstances. Her family put it best: she wanted to be a normal, healthy kid. But what made her extraordinary was her refusal to let disease be the whole story. She turned her battle into a public ledger of resilience, humor, and microscopic joys.

Now here’s where I get mad on her behalf. It should not take a 14-year-old with leukemia to remind us how to live gratefully. Adults — myself included — are experts at whining over slow WiFi, skipped Amazon deliveries, and the “tragedy” of getting served the wrong latte milk.

Meanwhile, Zuza was documenting every needle, every flare of pain, and still finding joy in a ray of sunlight or the right shade of lip gloss. That’s not just brave. That’s revolutionary.

And let’s talk about social media for a second. We dismiss it as shallow, toxic, or the end of civilisation. But Zuza flipped that script. She showed it could be a platform for radical honesty, for building community, for reminding us that authenticity doesn’t have to be packaged in pastel fonts and “Live, Laugh, Love” slogans. She wasn’t selling hope — she was living it in real time, messy and unfiltered.

So yes, Zuza Beine died at 14. That’s the headline. But the legacy? She leaves behind a digital manual on how to navigate pain, gratitude, and mortality without flinching. Her videos weren’t just cancer chronicles. They were life chronicles. And if we were paying attention, they were also a mirror — asking us whether we’re actually awake to the “tiny things” in our own lives, or just scrolling past them.

Maybe the best way to honor her is not to sanctify her — kids like Zuza don’t need our pity or pedestal-building. The best way is to log off our petty grievances, notice the small joys, and, like her, pay something forward.

Because Zuza Beine, all of 14, has already done more of that than most of us will in a lifetime.