Remembering Aprille Through Art, Presence, and Purpose

This reflection honors our beloved colleague, Dr. Aprille Young, and the ways her presence, leadership, and care continue to shape the William James College community. As both an alum and faculty member, Aprille’s connection to William James College was deep and enduring, reflecting a life of learning, teaching, mentorship, and service.

In the Dandelion Nebula, a memorial art installation on view at the College, was created with deep love and intention by Aprille’s dear friend, artist, and fellow faculty member, Dr. Erika Heilman. The piece reflects the spirit, values, and influence Aprille brought to her work and relationships, carrying traces of friendship, shared practice, and lasting impact. Below is a reflection from artist, Dr. Erika Heilman.

Community members are invited to visit the installation, located on the first floor outside Room 127, as a space to pause, reflect, and feel close to Aprille’s presence and legacy. We extend our heartfelt gratitude to Erika for this generous gift, and for creating a space where remembrance and meaning continue to unfold.

Remembering Aprille by Dr. Erika Heilman

Since first coming to know Aprille in 2015 through the Organizational and Leadership Psychology department at William James College, our relationship grew from peers in a shared practitioner-academic community into collegial trust and deep friendship. When we began co-teaching in 2021, that bond deepened in a new and purposeful way. Teaching about the use of self meant practicing it ourselves, bringing identity, presence, values, awareness, regulated emotion, curiosity, and intention into our lectures and leadership lessons in service of something larger than ourselves.

That same commitment to presence, purpose, and service was evident throughout Aprille’s illness. After being diagnosed with stage three triple-negative breast cancer in 2023, Aprille began an aggressive course of treatment soon after and continued through it until she passed away on May 14, 2025. Throughout those nineteen months, she showed incredible resilience, optimism, and unwavering strength. She continued to show up with care and purpose for her students, colleagues, work, family, and community. She also advocated fiercely for herself and others, drawing on her own experience to push for more compassionate and responsive cancer patient care.

I began the painting in July 2025 as part of the ongoing process of grieving and honoring her. Painting and mixed media art have always been meditative practices for me, spaces where expression, reflection, and storytelling converge, and Aprille always supported the messy, intuitive forms of my abstract art. I continued adding to the piece while writing the words I planned to share at her Remembrance Day that October. After speaking about the lessons I learned from her, I kept creating in her honor, wanting to carry forward what felt like gifts she would want me and others to remember. Those gifts became the center of the piece: perspective, presence, and energy.

The words around each gift became part of the painting, mounted on cutouts from other paintings of mine that I had repurposed. That process felt especially meaningful because Aprille had helped me develop repurposing pieces of my own art as a creative and sustainable practice. We often shared mindfulness practices, craft tips, and creative resources, knowing that creative expression was essential to both of our self-care equations.

Those shared values shaped both the process and the design. Aprille had a way of seeing people’s light before they could fully see it themselves, and then helping them trust it. She helped people reframe what felt heavy or tangled and find new perspective, meaning, and direction. That same spirit is reflected in the dandelions, which Aprille saw as the ultimate reframe: where some people see a weed, others see a wish.

Creating this piece allowed me to express what a single medium alone could not hold. Each dandelion head contains words and layered meaning, with phrases spiraling outward like seeds carried on the wind. The deep blue, purple, silver, and gold background became a cosmic field, textured with movement, light, and dandelion seeds. To me, it represents Aprille’s influence and the way her brilliance continues to ripple outward. Her work, like her life, was grounded in service, growth, and care. When others see this artwork, I hope they feel invited to consider the lessons Aprille embodied, to remember or come to know her extraordinary presence, humor, generosity, brilliance, creativity, and generative leadership, and to see that even in loss, there is still beauty, meaning, and possibility.

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