Cibele Marchis, 28, and her mother, Maria Elisabete Nogueira, 56, died just hours apart after both battling cancer. Now, the family has shared heartbreaking details about their deaths.
Losing a loved one to cancer is an unimaginable experience for any family. But few families are forced to grieve the loss of two loved ones to cancer within just hours of one another. That is the heartbreaking reality now facing the family of Cibele Marchis, 28, and Maria Elisabete Nogueira, 56.
Cibele died in Mogi Guaçu, in the Brazilian state of São Paulo, at 4 p.m. on September 24. Her mother, who was being treated at a different hospital, died only ten hours later, at approximately 2 a.m. on September 25.
Had made a heartbreaking request
Before their deaths, both Cibele and Maria had made a special request: They did not want to be told if the other died while they were apart. As a result, Maria was not aware of her daughter’s death when she passed away.
“Neither of them wanted to see the other die,” Cibele’s cousin Rowilson Leandro da Costa told G1, according to UNILAD. “They even talked about it, sometimes jokingly, sometimes seriously — and it happened. Neither of them knew about the other’s death. It’s truly astonishing.”
Cibele’s father was then left to mourn both his daughter and his wife.
“He lost his family. To come home and find no one there anymore – it’s sad, difficult,” Rowilson added.
In an Instagram post from 2025, Cibele explained that she had been diagnosed with a rare form of adrenal cancer.
“A year ago, I discovered that I had a rare adrenal cancer — a 10 cm tumor that had already taken over my kidney.
“Getting to the diagnosis was a long road. I could feel that something was wrong, but none of the tests showed why. Even so, I never ignored what I was feeling… Not long afterward, kidney pain led me to get a CT scan, and there was the tumor.”
Buried in a joint ceremony
According to G1, Maria Elisabete was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer approximately one year after her daughter received her own devastating diagnosis.
Details about Maria Elisabete’s illness and the treatment she received have not been widely reported.
Despite spending their final hours in different hospitals, the mother and daughter were ultimately laid to rest together. Local media reports say their funerals were held in the same ceremony, according to UNILAD.
After facing cancer side by side, Cibele and Maria were reunited one final time in death — and their family was left to mourn them together.
The request they shared gives the short interval between their deaths an especially painful meaning. Even while facing their own illnesses, each was concerned about the grief the other’s death would bring. Being treated in separate hospitals meant that the family had to carry news that neither woman wanted to receive. Their final wish expressed the closeness of their relationship without changing the hardship of being apart.
The joint funeral brought their stories together after those separate final hours. For the relatives left behind, however, a shared ceremony also meant confronting two losses at once. The account of Cibele’s father returning to an empty home captures that change in ordinary terms: the people around whom daily life had been organized were both gone. Remembering the mother and daughter together acknowledges the bond they maintained through illness and the grief their family now carries.
