I think there's a misunderstanding here about how change fees work. There's no fee to simply cancel a ticket. You can always walk away and owe nothing more than you paid to purchase the ticket.

The change fee comes at the time of rebooking. If you want to reuse part of a canceled ticket, the airline subtracts the change fee from the ticket's value and applies that balance to your next purchase. If the fee is more than the ticket cost, the balance is zero. There is no such thing as a negative balance. For example, if your first ticket cost $109 and the change fee is $150, you don't have to pay the extra $41. You just buy the new ticket with no credit carried over from the previous ticket.