It is with great sadness that we report the death of our dear friend and colleague Cindy Littlefair on Tuesday, April 15, 2025.
Cindy was known to many members of the Lion’s Roar community and our partners as the creator of our annual fund-raising auction. She was honest, strong, and caring in her role as the long-time human resources manager for more than 18 years at Lion’s Roar, and helped us live the principles of the dharma in our work.
Cindy touched readers of Lion’s Roar magazine with her wise and moving story, “I Won’t Fight Death to the Death” about how Buddhism helped her as she faced her illness and impending death. She was a dear and invaluable part of our lives who did so much to make Lion’s Roar special as a place to work. As a devoted practitioner of Buddhism, she contributed to our mission to offer the teachings of wisdom and compassion to the modern world, and she strived to live her own life according to those principles. We’ll deeply miss her presence in our lives and work.
To get a real feeling for the strong and amazing person Cindy was, the challenges she faced in her life, and all that she accomplished, read the tribute that her son Sam Littlefair, himself a former editor at Lion’s Roar, wrote to his mother:
My mom, Cindy Littlefair, died on April 15 at the Halifax Hospice, surrounded by friends and family. She was 65. Cindy was a school board member, a writer, a Buddhist, a prolific friend, and mother of four.
Death comes for us all, but, for mom, I think her untimely death carried peculiar meaning. She spent her whole life deeply curious about mortality, following a childhood beset by tragedy. As a result, she maintained a light-hearted awareness of death, always reminding herself to live each day with curiosity and enthusiasm, knowing that this life generally ends without warning and without ceremony.
Mom was the youngest of six children in a blue-collar family in Peterborough, Ontario. By the time she was born, two of her older siblings had already died in separate tragedies. She wouldn’t learn their names until she found photos of them in the attic as a child. Her two remaining brothers died before she reached adolescence. Mom shared this story with her kids to show us the preciousness of life, encouraging us to invest in friendships and experiences over possessions.
In her twenties, mom struggled to reconcile her traumatic childhood with the pleasant quietude surrounding her as a factory worker in small-town Ontario. That’s when she found Buddhism. “It saved my life,” she said many times. Buddhism told her that everyone experiences suffering and death. In 1984, at age 25, she moved to Halifax as part of a Buddhist migration.
In Halifax, mom and her first husband Ken had three children: Paige, myself, and Allister. She and her next partner, Gary, had one child, Grace. Mom always made it clear that her children were her greatest joy in life. She sewed our halloween costumes, designed scavenger hunts for our birthdays, and encouraged us to travel the world.
In her spare time, mom’s greatest passions were thrift shopping and writing. She combined those interests in a financial advice column for Halifax’s Daily News, “Life in the Cheap Lane.” She paid off her mortgage in thirteen years, finding herself mortgage-free at age forty. When she submitted herself to The Globe and Mail‘s financial column for advice, the columnist said he had no advice to give and instead showcased her as an exemplar of household economics.
At age 43, mom leveraged her financial freedom to gift herself a four-day workweek, using her Fridays to work on her personal projects. For many years, she used that time to focus on writing, publishing a weekly column about life in Halifax’s North End in The Chronicle Herald.
As we four children made our way through school, mom served on the Parent-Teacher Association for our elementary school, St. Mary’s. During the school board’s repeated attempts to close the school, mom toiled to save it. (St. Mary’s survives to this day, in large part due to her work.) Inspired by that experience, in 2012 she ran for school board, where she served one and a half terms. She focused much of her energy on governance reform to make the board more effective. In her perennial effort to engage the public, she wrote columns and blog posts about important school board issues, including a column for The Coast encouraging others to run for the board. That work was all lost when the Liberal government disbanded school boards in 2018.
After the school board, mom returned to her writing projects. She wrote a draft of a book about her childhood, which inspired her to enroll in a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction at King’s (never having been to university before). She graduated with her MFA in 2022 at age 62.
In the last two years of her life, mom found an agent for her book and started a Substack to promote her writing. She published a story in The New York Times‘ Modern Love column. She was looking forward to a retirement spent writing, drinking wine with friends, traveling, walking her dog, and chatting with acquaintances up and down Agricola St.
That was mom. She was compulsively social. She loved hearing everyone’s stories — the mundane and the extraordinary. She loved knowing her neighbours and chatting with them in the hallway. She maintained an impressive mental rolodex of acquaintances who she would happily call up for advice or a favour. She loved her day job as a human resources manager at the Lion’s Roar Foundation, largely because it brought her in contact with her beloved coworkers — many of whom in turn counted her as a close friend. She once told me that she wrote personal responses to every single job application that came across her desk (often hundreds of resumes for a single posting). She had a close circle of chosen family, and a wider, shifting circle of clan. Our family’s Sunday dinners welcomed friends, friends of friends, partners, exes, exes’ exes, boarding students, and mom’s one foster child.
Mom was diagnosed with bladder cancer in January 2024. For the last months of her life, she was almost always in bed, and she was almost never alone. Her family and friends rallied to take care of her around the clock.
Before her cancer diagnosis, mom said that she aspired to die “all used up,” knowing that she had applied herself to the end, that her body had nothing left to give. That end came sooner than expected, but she nonetheless realized that goal; she gave us everything she had. “I love people,” she would often say, and many people loved her back. I think it’s true (and I think she would be happy to know) that she leaves behind a community that is stronger thanks to her dedication and enthusiasm.
Read a full obituary of Cindy Maureen Littlefair here. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the Afterwords Literary Festival.
