TikTok is mourning an icon.
Lynn Yamada Davis, better known to her 30 million followers as Cooking With Lynja, died from esophageal cancer Jan. 1, her daughter Hannah Mariko Shofet confirmed to The New York Times. She was 67.
Davis's son Tim Davis, who edited the content creator's videos, told the outlet, "My mom was like my partner in crime."
Davis rose to fame on social media in 2020 after she and Tim began posting her Cooking with Lynja series on TikTok. The creative videos, which featured Davis lovingly teaching viewers how to make a variety of dishes, also featured Tim's quirky editing techniques. They first went viral with their June 2020 bacon, egg and cheese sandwich, and routinely garnered millions of views, showing fans how to make everything from white truffle potato chips to chocolate yogurt patties.
Davis "had this whole chapter as a groundbreaking female engineer" prior to her social media fame, according to her daughter Hannah. The matriarch held degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia University Business School before working at Bell Labs and in telecommunications.
However, she had privately faced health challenges over the last few years. The TikToker was first diagnosed with throat cancer in 2019 and was later diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 2021, per The New York Times.
Davis is also survived by her husband Keith Davis as well as her children Sean and Becky.
Her social media accounts have remained active since her passing (the most recent video of her going truffle hunting was posted on Jan. 11), with Tim telling the NYT he has been sharing the completed videos at his mom's request. He added that he'll stop posting once those videos run out.
"[She was] the internet's grandma," Tim said in a Jan. 12 TikTok video. "She was the best. So glad that you guys all got to experience how wonderful of a person she was and that you guys treated her so well. So thank you for these last couple of years, we had so much fun making videos."
In the wake of her passing, collaborator and friend Nick DiGiovanni also shared a heartbreaking tribute. "You probably knew her as the fun loving cooking grandma," he noted in a video on his social media channels Jan. 12, "but I'll always remember her as the woman who fought off her cancer diagnoses for it as long as she could, humble and quietly, without every complaining until it got the best of her."