Melanie Puddefoot Rychlik arrived in Pottersbar, Hertfordshire England, on April 12, in a year she had no intention of revealing to anyone outside her family, husband, and documents where legally required (a trait she shared with her mother, Brenda). She was the younger of two girls and the pride and joy of her parents, Brenda and Dennis.

Rumor has it her mum was enjoying a cream cake in the hospital, with plenty of time before “baby comes,” and the next minute Melanie arrived with no warning. This was the signature for everything in her life. When she decided to do something, she went for it, full steam ahead and on her time line.  Nothing held Melanie back!

At the age of one, the family set off for Johannesburg, South Africa. Young Mel had many passions, but one of her biggest was her animals and the large collection she acquired: dogs, a cat, a rabbit, a guinea pig, some fish, and several birds, including a cockatiel she spent four hours tracking in the trees before capturing it and bringing it home.  If you love something set it free, and Melanie let that bird free in her bedroom, where it would swoop down on anyone who entered, much to her delight and entertainment.  After a great deal of pleading with her parents, she got a hamster for Christmas one year.  She named it Koobie, and five days later Koobie gave birth to seven babies. Melanie thought she had hit the jackpot—she worked her butt off to get one hamster and ended up with eight.

Her keen sense of adventure and thrill-seeking did lead to some troubling moments when she was younger. At the age of three, Melanie plunged fearlessly into the deep end of the swimming pool without her water wings, causing her family great angst, as she had not completed her swimming lessons.  At age six, one morning at six a.m. she felt a powerful urge to swing and ended up slipping off the swing set and landing on her elbows, managing to break not one but both of them.  She spent weeks with her arms tied up around her neck like a mental patient in a straitjacket.  The result of this was that they set in a very peculiar manner. Her dad told her not to be deterred by the small fact that one arm was set backward.  Afterward her arms were very bent, but with a lot of effort she found ways to work around it, learning swimming strokes that allowed her to compensate, and working with a tennis coach who helped her with her serve and play with her former skill.  With regular massaging with vitamin E oil and pep talks from her beloved dad, Mel went on to make her bendy elbows an advantage rather than a handicap; it would never have occurred to her to use this setback as an excuse not to try—or not to succeed. 

From an early age, Melanie was goal oriented.  If you wanted to get her to do anything as a kid you could totally bribe her with Raspberry Hubbly Bubbly soda or White Rabbit sweets from Japan.  Not something most people keep in their drawer—but luckily her tastes evolved a bit in later life.

Melanie attended Craighall convent and then its sister school, Rosebank Convent.  She loved being competitive—Melanie played to win! It was her ultimate high.  In high school she and her sister, Tracy, joined a rather dismal swim team that never won anything.  But with Melanie on the team—and a lot of cheering from her array of enthusiastic friends—the team went on to win the swim gala.  Her teams won every other sporting event that year, including tennis, which would become a great love.  Melanie gathered a plethora of trophies, much to her delight.  They were displayed proudly by the front door for everyone to admire. “If you are going to do it, you may as well do it well—and get the praise for it,” was her motto.

While Melanie was very bright academically and involved in many activities, it was her passion for tennis that really kept her focus.  Melanie broke her school record by winning the singles and doubles championships five years in a row, and was ranked in the top twenty in South Africa as a junior.  She played for the Wanderers Club adult tennis league—at age fifteen—and made the first team, taking them to the win for their season. (She also partnered with her dad, Dennis, for a mixed doubles tournament and gave him the satisfaction of his one and only win.)

After all her achievements on the court, she received a full scholarship to Weber State University in Utah, turning down not only offers from Clemson and Tennessee to accept it, but also a modeling contract with Ford modeling agency.

Her tennis triumphs continued in college.  She played line one as a freshman and was MVP and All Conference player of the WAC conference. She led her team to multiple conference titles, and was number one seed at the Ulster Open, a professional tennis tournament in Northern Ireland.

After completing college Melanie moved back to South Africa, a country she deeply loved.  There she embarked on what would become her first job in a lifelong love for her chosen career path, recruiting: she worked for Kelly Personal Services as a branch manager. Never content to be average, Melanie won branch for the year for her office, and helped transition the workforce with the end of apartheid—something she was passionate about.  It was during this period that Melanie met one of the loves of her life…her Chow Monty, who had an enormous amount of fur and a really black tongue that hung out constantly.

Eventually Melanie relocated back to the States, living in Utah, Las Vegas, Florida, and spending a lot of time in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where her family then resided, before finally settling in Texas.  She loved it: the heat, the pace, the people—all of it.  She started off in Houston, purchasing a house on the water in League City.  Melanie loved ambiance and being around plants, trees, and water.

While in League City she was able to continue to explore her deep passion for animals, serving as a volunteer at the League City Animal Shelter.  There she helped rescue and care for multiple animals, including Clyde, a Lab she found on the side of the road, who weighed just 27 pounds and had a broken hip, and of course became a part of Melanie’s family.

In 2001 she had an opportunity to move to Austin to take the branch manager position for Ajilon Staffing Services. Austin, Texas, is where she really found her home.  She absolutely loved it!  After a time she transitioned into real estate with Coldwell Banker, where—true to her overachieving form—she won “Rookie of the Year” in 2005.

But Melanie couldn’t stay away from recruiting for long—she returned to her career roots and eventually achieved the position of recruiting director for New York Life, Metlife, and Northwestern Mutual.  She won Recruiter of the Year at Northwestern in 2018 for the entire company (are you surprised?).

In 2008 Melanie was playing in a tennis tournament when she met Greg Rychlik, whose doubles partner was dating her partner. “Oh, this night’s going to be interesting,” Greg remembers thinking, as Melanie immediately turned on her flirty, competitive charm—on and off the court (he remembers their excellent banter as she tried to one-up his Texas swagger with her South African pride).  The banter continued for months of casual conversations until one night when they saw each other at a party and Melanie planted on Greg “the biggest kiss I’d ever had.” Pretty soon they met to play tennis one Friday night—and they were inseparable after that.

In July of 2011, in the middle of Melanie’s treatment for a brain parasite that had caused serious health problems, “something just hit me—now’s the time,” Greg says.  He’d spent weeks trying to train the youngest of their three dogs, Bo, to carry the ring box to Melanie, but that night the box—which he’d tried taping to the dog’s collar—kept falling off because the Bo kept shaking it off.  Finally, Greg simply called all three dogs out to the patio, made them sit (no doubt as witnesses), and asked her to marry him—to Melanie’s total surprise. (She always told people “Greg proposed to me at my worst.”)  They married in 2012.

Though opposites in many ways—Melanie loved estate sales and consignment shops, for instance, and Greg…did not—they found shared interests where they could enjoy each other’s company, like hiking, tennis, and travel. True to form, if Greg had a passion for something, Melanie dove into the deep end: Because he loved Husker football, she “became a bigger fan than me.”  Because he loved fishing, she threw herself wholeheartedly into the sport. And they enjoyed creating their own traditions together—on Thanksgiving week, for instance, they would play in a husband-and-wife tennis tournament and then go fishing together.  Melanie, of course, always competitive, was determined to out fish Greg—but then immediately apologized to each and every fish she caught for catching and eating it.

Both valued compromise in their relationship based on whoever felt the most passionately about a subject—to the point where they almost always settled on a solution both liked better anyway.  Greg loved Melanie’s complexity, and her unswerving loyalty and integrity, and describes her as magnetic—“when she walked into a room people tended to gravitate to her.”

Melanie was a woman of many passions—animals, nature, wine, telling a good story (with a little embellishment), astrology, and living life to the fullest.  She continued her love of tennis her entire life, both watching and playing.  She remained active in the sport, playing competitively at both the 4.5 and 5.0 levels, and was named Capital Area Tennis Association player of the year in 2014.

Family, friends, fitness, work, and social life were all so important to her.  She enjoyed a very diverse group of friends, each one an absolute treasure to her.  That appreciation for her wide variety of friends, who became family to her,was a trait that endured all her life. Melanie, from an early age, was a champion of the underdog, and she especially had a knack for sensing those who could use a friend and made it her business to take great care of them and make sure they were included.

Her heartfelt passion for helping animals in distress eventually led to her involvement doing the same for people down on their luck, and she became involved in helping feed the homeless with Mobile Loaves and Fishes.  Melanie felt so much empathy for their situation that she wanted to go out and sleep in the parks with them to experience what they were going through (though that got a firm thumbs-down from family members).  She worked with CASA (Court-Appointed Special Advocates), helping represent the interests of children in the foster system, giving her heart entirely to all the kids she looked after.  She also was an active volunteer with the Make a Wish Foundation.  Melanie’s generosity of spirit was without limit.

Her perfect day would be to get up early, enjoy a cup of coffee, water her plants, putter in the garden with her dogs, then go spinning, do yoga, go to work and find a good recruit, call her family members to check on them and sometimes have a laugh or cry, then return home, play with her dogs, pour a glass of wine, and sit and enjoy while Greg cooked a wonderful meal—which she would always enjoy with gusto.

Melanie was always very close to her parents, and she was thrilled when they announced their plans to move to Austin.  But when her fathers' health began to deteriorate, he wanted to stay in Albuquerque.  Last month he passed away, a devastating loss for her.   Tragically, Melanie passed away three weeks later, before she was able to move her mom close by, as she had planned.  

There were so many special things about Melanie, but the one that stands out most is when she was going through the hell of dealing with a parasite in her brain and no one was sure what she was dealing with. Melanie said at the time: “If I go tomorrow, I have absolutely no regrets, I’ve lived a great life.  There are not many people who can say that and really mean it.”  She lived and loved every minute of her life to the fullest.

Melanie is survived by her husband and best friend, Greg; their three Labs, Jake, Suh, and Bo; her mom, Brenda; sister Tracy and her husband, John; and nieces Sammie and Lexi.