Within the space of a single night, one Brazilian family lost both a daughter and a mother.
On September 24, 2026, 28-year-old Cibele Fernanda Marchis died after living with a rare and aggressive cancer. Across Mogi Guaçu, in the state of São Paulo, her 56-year-old mother, Maria Elisabete Nogueira da Silva, known to friends and relatives as Bia, was critically ill in another hospital.
Cibele’s family began gathering to say goodbye.
Then, during the early hours of September 25, another call came. Bia had died too.
Only about ten hours separated their deaths.
That extraordinary timing became the headline when the story traveled beyond Brazil. But focusing only on those ten hours misses much of what happened. Their story involved two different cancers, years of treatment and uncertainty, and a remarkable conversation mother and daughter had reportedly shared before their final hospitalizations: neither wanted to live through the news that the other had died first.
In the end, neither did.
Cibele’s diagnosis began with an exceptionally rare cancer
Cibele’s health problems emerged in late 2023. Medical investigations eventually revealed a tumor involving one of her adrenal glands. In accounts she later shared publicly, Cibele described a mass that had grown to roughly 10 centimeters and had affected one of her kidneys.
She was diagnosed with adrenocortical carcinoma, a malignancy arising in the outer layer of the adrenal gland.
What followed was not a straightforward course of treatment.
Cibele underwent three surgeries as well as chemotherapy. After one operation, she reportedly suffered an intestinal perforation followed by a severe infection, leading to a stay of more than 20 days in intensive care, according to accounts of her experience later reported by Brazilian media.
The diagnosis itself is remarkably uncommon. The U.S. National Cancer Institute estimates the annual incidence of adrenocortical carcinoma at roughly two cases per million people. National Cancer Institute: Adrenocortical Carcinoma Treatment
Yet as serious as the disease became, Cibele did not want cancer to become the only story people told about her.
She had cancer, but she was more than a cancer patient
Cibele worked in digital marketing and was an entrepreneur. She spoke publicly about illness and treatment, but her life did not become exclusively about medical appointments and hospital rooms.
She continued to talk about work, relationships, family and ordinary life.
After her death, her business partner, Eloá Righi, described this distinction in interviews with the media: Cibele did not want to be reduced to the identity of “the girl with cancer.” Cancer was something she was living with, not a complete description of who she was.
It is an important distinction that can easily disappear when serious illness enters a family.
To outsiders, a person may gradually become “the patient.” To themselves, they remain a daughter, friend, professional, partner, colleague and someone still making plans for tomorrow.
Then, while Cibele was dealing with her own illness, cancer entered the family for a second time.
Her mother became ill.
What seemed like a gallbladder problem turned out to be something far more serious
Bia was 56 and worked as a podiatrist in Mogi Guaçu.
According to family accounts reported in Brazil, she initially sought medical attention believing her symptoms might be connected to gallstones. Further investigation brought a very different diagnosis: pancreatic cancer.
The circumstances illustrate one of the difficulties surrounding pancreatic cancer. The disease does not always produce obvious warning signs at an early stage.
The National Cancer Institute notes that symptoms can include jaundice, abdominal or back pain, unexplained weight loss, loss of appetite and fatigue. The difficulty is that many of these symptoms can also occur with conditions that are far more common and considerably less serious. National Cancer Institute: Pancreatic Cancer Symptoms
There is also no standard population-wide screening test for pancreatic cancer for people at average risk. National Cancer Institute: Pancreatic Cancer Screening
Bia’s condition eventually deteriorated rapidly. She was admitted to hospital on September 17.
One week later, both mother and daughter were hospitalized.
They were not, however, in the same hospital.
Two hospitals in the same city
By September 24, Cibele’s condition had become critical.
She died at around 4 p.m.
Elsewhere in Mogi Guaçu, Bia was under sedation. She was not told that her only daughter had died.
Relatives began preparing for Cibele’s wake, and friends and family gathered to say goodbye. Then, while they were still mourning her, another message arrived.
Shortly before 2 a.m. on September 25, Bia died as well.
The interval between the two deaths was approximately ten hours.
It sounds almost like a detail written for a film. But there is no need to add mystery to what happened. These were two seriously ill women with different cancers whose deaths happened to occur extraordinarily close together.
What gives those ten hours another dimension is something their relatives revealed afterward.
Mother and daughter had already talked about who might die first
Cibele’s cousin, Rowilson Leandro da Costa, told Brazilian media that the two women had discussed death before.
Sometimes the subject was approached seriously. At other times, humor apparently helped them deal with something neither wanted to contemplate.
But they shared a particular fear.
Neither wanted to watch the other die. And neither wanted to receive the news that the other was already gone.
Their final hours unfolded in such a way that neither had to.
Cibele died without knowing that her mother would follow only hours later.
Bia, who was sedated, died without learning that her daughter had already died.
Did their cancers have a genetic connection?
When cancer occurs in both a parent and a child, it is natural for families to wonder whether an inherited mutation might be responsible.
But two cancer diagnoses within one family do not, by themselves, establish a hereditary cancer syndrome.
Adrenocortical carcinoma can sometimes occur in association with inherited conditions. The National Cancer Institute notes links with genetic syndromes including Li-Fraumeni syndrome, Lynch syndrome and multiple endocrine neoplasia type 1. That does not mean every person who develops this rare cancer has inherited a cancer-causing variant. National Cancer Institute: Adrenocortical Carcinoma Treatment
Pancreatic cancer can also occur in people carrying certain inherited genetic variants, while many cases arise without a known hereditary syndrome.
Determining whether two cancers within a family are connected requires considerably more information than the fact that both occurred. Doctors may consider the exact tumor types, ages at diagnosis, cancers among other relatives and, when appropriate, genetic testing.
No publicly available information about Cibele and Bia establishes that their cancers shared a hereditary cause.
Their deaths occurring ten hours apart does not provide evidence of such a connection either.
One person was left to absorb both losses
The story becomes different when viewed from the perspective of the person who survived them.
Cibele was the couple’s only child.
Her father therefore lost his daughter and his wife within the same night.
The family chose not to widely publicize his identity, but a relative later described how difficult it had become for him to return home after the deaths.
The house that had belonged to a family of three suddenly had only one person coming back to it.
That detail perhaps conveys the scale of what happened more clearly than the coincidence that made the story international news.
For two years, the family had been living with appointments, operations, treatments, hospitalizations and uncertainty. Then, in the course of a few hours, both illnesses reached their end.
Their final goodbye was together
After Bia’s death, arrangements were made so mother and daughter could be mourned together.
Both women were buried on September 25 at the Santo Antônio Municipal Cemetery in Mogi Guaçu. The municipality also published an official obituary record for Cibele confirming her death and burial. Mogi Guaçu municipal obituary record for Cibele Marchis
As the story spread internationally, it was inevitably condensed into a striking sentence: a mother and daughter died from cancer just ten hours apart.
The sentence is true.
It is also incomplete.
Behind those ten hours were years of treatment, three surgeries for a woman still in her twenties, a prolonged stay in intensive care, a second cancer diagnosis within the same family and two people trying to maintain ordinary life while confronting illnesses that had become anything but ordinary.
Perhaps the most memorable part of their story, then, is not the clock.
It is a conversation they had before anyone knew how close their deaths would eventually be.
Neither wanted to experience the moment of being told that the other was gone.
In the end, neither had to.