Auxilia will always be remembered for her selfless and unconditional love for others. Named by a missionary as "helper," she did indeed dedicate her life to serving others. As a graphic designer, photographer, and journalist, she infused her creativity into her way of life. A week year after her son, John, passed away from liver cancer caused by hepatitis B, she was also diagnosed with the same disease. In 1994, she died less than a year after her diagnosis. However, friends and family often recall with fond affection that she did not let hepatitis B take her life without a passionate fight. At a time when doctors frowned upon patients who were proactive in their treatment options, Auxilia made it known that it was her life, her body, and that she wasn't just a medical record number. She spent the first few months after John died writing a book about his battle with hepatitis B. And at the end, after alternative therapies and flights to Japan, she accepted her fate with great fortitude and chose her own way to leave this world.

Excerpt from essay Leslie wrote about her mother:

"The night before MaMa chose to die, I sat in a plastic-wrapped chair beside her hospital bed listening to air move through blistered lung passages. In a week, I would turn twenty-one.

My mother and brother wanted to see my life continue as if unchanged by their illness. But the MCAT books were scattered, forgotten, around my chair. My attention spun around MaMa’s bony hands.

With my thumb, I soothed a gray spot on MaMa’s forefinger, which had sketched the world around her with rapidograph pen or pencil. I kissed the callus on her thumb where she steadied the wooden stem of brushes stroking canvas and rubbed the bitten nail of her camera trigger.

I come from a long line of artists on my MaMa’s side and warriors on BaBa’s side. Wai Paul, MaMa’s mother, graduated from a famous art school in China. While all her seven siblings dabbled in the arts, MaMa was the only one to make art a profession, receiving a master’s in journalism with a minor in advertising from Southern Illinois University. A metal art table with swivel chair and swinging light dominated the room where MaMa worked. The table was my shelter, even after she died. From its undercarriage, an artist was born. I colored in drafts of MaMa’s advertisements, and experimented with charcoal, colored pencils, and other tools that rolled onto the floor. From its green padded top, MaMa taught me how to sketch, paint, photograph, design, and write.

She had taught me well with these hands, now inactive and frail. Every Saturday morning, my brother and I groaned through Chinese classes until the elective period where MaMa taught art. Our sketches morphed from two dimensions to three. Pencils worked their magic on the page, fruits forever ripe and ready to burst. She patiently showed us the power of art, how it could safeguard, sustain and mean something different to each beholder."