Six Weeks to Say Goodbye: What I Learned About Grief at 50

Watching someone die slowly teaches you everything about living deliberately.

Six weeks.

That’s all the time I had between “Your mother has bladder cancer” and standing in a funeral home picking out a casket.

Six weeks is 42 days. 1,008 hours. But somehow it felt like both a lifetime and a single breath.

I was 50 years old. My sister and I had just gotten back from a cruise—my big birthday celebration, complete with umbrella drinks and laughter and that specific kind of joy that comes from marking a milestone. We’d toasted to the next chapter, to getting older, to having “so much life ahead.”

Two weeks later, the diagnosis came.

The universe has a dark sense of humor sometimes.

I thought I had more time. We always think we have more time.

The shock doesn’t care about your age

Here’s what nobody tells you: turning 50 doesn’t prepare you for losing your mother.

You’d think five decades of life would build some kind of emotional armor. That all those years of adulting—paying mortgages, raising kids, handling crises at work—would somehow make you ready.

They don’t.

At 50, I cried like I was five. I felt lost like I’d never felt lost before. And I discovered that grief doesn’t give a damn about your résumé, your bank account, or how many candles were on your last birthday cake.

The cruel mathematics of cancer

Bladder cancer is a bitch.

It took my mother from relatively healthy to gone in six weeks. Six weeks where every day felt like standing on a train track watching the headlight get brighter, unable to move, unable to stop what was coming.

The doctors used words like “aggressive” and “stage four” and “palliative care.” Words that sound clinical until they’re about your mother.

I learned that cancer time operates differently than normal time. Six weeks became this strange, compressed universe where we tried to fit a lifetime of conversations, apologies, gratitude, and love into increasingly shorter visits.

What grief actually feels like

Everyone talks about the five stages of grief like they’re a checklist. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, right?

Wrong.

Grief is more like a drunk DJ switching between tracks with no warning. One minute you’re fine, laughing at a meme. The next, you’re crying in the cereal aisle because your mom used to buy that brand.

I thought I knew sadness. I’d experienced loss before. But this was different.

This was existential. This was realizing that I’m now the older generation. This was understanding that all those times I said “I’ll call her tomorrow” just ran out of tomorrows.

And here’s the weird part: sometimes grief is boring.

Yes, boring. There are days when you’re just numb, going through motions, feeling nothing, and then feeling guilty about feeling nothing. Grief isn’t always dramatic tears and clutching photographs. Sometimes it’s just Tuesday, and Tuesday feels gray and empty and impossibly long.

When your body is already a war zone

Here’s what sucked: I was in perimenopause when all this happened.

So let me paint you a picture. I’m already dealing with night sweats, brain fog, mood swings that make me feel like I’m possessed, and a body that’s staging its own personal rebellion. My hormones are already throwing a farewell party for my reproductive years.

And then my mother gets diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Your body will betray you.

After she died, I couldn’t sleep for weeks. Then I couldn’t stay awake. I lost my appetite. Then I ate everything in sight. My body became this unreliable narrator of my emotional state.

But here’s the thing: I couldn’t tell what was grief and what was perimenopause.

Was I crying because I missed my mother, or because my estrogen decided to tank at 3 PM on a Thursday? Was I exhausted from sadness or from the fact that I hadn’t slept through the night in months? Was this rage about her dying or about everything and nothing and my jeans not fitting?

Yes. The answer was yes to all of it.

Grief and perimenopause are like two hurricanes colliding. You can’t separate the systems. You just survive the storm.

Sleep weird. Eat weird. Cry at random. Rage at small inconveniences. Forget words mid-sentence. Your body is processing both trauma and a major hormonal shift, and it’s going to be messy.

And can we talk about the cosmic joke of losing your mother right when your body is reminding you that you’re aging? That you’re becoming the older generation at the exact moment you’re losing the generation above you?

Yeah. The universe wasn’t subtle with that one.

People will say stupid things

“She’s in a better place.” “At least she didn’t suffer long.” “God needed another angel.”

I know they mean well. I do. But when you’re drowning in grief, these platitudes feel like someone handing you a Band-Aid for a severed limb.

The people who helped most? The ones who said “This sucks” and brought food. The ones who didn’t try to fix it or find meaning in it. The ones who just sat with me in the suck.

Your grief will make other people uncomfortable

I learned that sustained grief makes people squirmy.

After a few weeks, there’s this unspoken expectation that you should be “over it” or at least “back to normal.” But there is no normal anymore. There’s just the new reality where your mother is gone.

Some friends disappeared. Some surprised me with their steadiness. You learn who can handle your broken and who needs you to be okay for their own comfort.

The permission slip you didn’t know you needed

Here’s what I wish someone had told me: you don’t have to be strong.

At 50, we’re supposed to have our shit together. We’re the sandwich generation—taking care of aging parents and grown kids and our own crumbling knees. We’re supposed to be the stable ones.

But grief doesn’t care about your responsibilities or your image.

You’re allowed to fall apart. You’re allowed to not be okay for longer than society deems acceptable. You’re allowed to be angry that this happened. You’re allowed to laugh at her funeral. You’re allowed to forget she’s dead and reach for your phone to call her.

You’re allowed to grieve messily, imperfectly, and on your own timeline.

What six weeks taught me

Those six weeks were hell. But they were also sacred.

I got to tell her I loved her. I got to say thank you. I got to hold her hand and be present for her exit from this world, just as she was present for my entrance.

Six weeks was nowhere near enough. But it was something.

I learned that love doesn’t end when someone dies. It just changes form. My mother is gone, but the imprint she left on me—the lessons, the laughter, the unconditional acceptance—that doesn’t disappear.

I learned that grief is just love with nowhere to go. And that’s not a problem to solve. It’s a testament to what mattered.

Moving forward (whatever that means)

It’s been a long time now. The rawness has dulled to an ache.

I still cry. Less often, but deeper somehow. I dream about her. Sometimes the dreams are beautiful. Sometimes I wake up and have to remember all over again that she’s gone.

At 50, I thought I knew who I was. Losing my mother has rewritten parts of that identity. I’m motherless now. An orphan, though that word feels strange at this age.

But I’m also the keeper of her stories. The person who got her sense of humor. The one who now makes her recipes and thinks of her every time.

Grief has changed me. Not all the changes are bad.

I’m more patient with other people’s pain. I’m less interested in bullshit. I say “I love you” more. I call my own kids more often. I understand, in my bones, that time is the one thing we can’t get back.

To anyone reading this from their own grief

If you’re in it right now—the fresh, raw, can’t-breathe part—I see you.

It won’t always feel this unbearable. It won’t feel “better,” exactly, but it will feel different. The weight doesn’t get lighter; you just get stronger at carrying it.

If you’re at 50, or 30, or 70, and you’ve lost your mother, I see you.

We’re in a club nobody wants to join, bound by this universal experience of loving someone and losing them and somehow having to keep living anyway.

You’ll find your way through. Not over it, not around it, but through it.

And on the other side, you’ll still carry them. In your voice, your choices, your capacity to love others with the same fierceness they loved you.

Six weeks wasn’t enough.

But the lifetime I had with her? That’s what I’ll carry forward.

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Some days will be hard. Some days will be okay. All of it is normal. All of it is part of loving someone who mattered. Be gentle with yourself.