By Jill E. Duffy
The first time Jude Treder-Wolff’s friend Maddie (not her real name) was diagnosed with cancer, she fought it, went into remission, and was pronounced cancer-free. Treder-Wolff was with her throughout the journey. The two first met as colleagues, but became very close and remained that way for more than a decade. “We were just in each other’s everything, you know?” Treder-Wolff said. Maddie was a single mom, and Jude and her husband never had children of their own, so they got together for holidays, birthdays, and dinners that went late into the night.
Over time, the friendship began to crack. One owed the other money. Communication wasn’t what it used to be. When Maddie got a second cancer diagnosis 18 years after the first, Treder-Wolff, then 50, struggled to figure out a relationship that had grown rocky. “I didn’t know how to support her in a way that felt helpful to her. I felt like everything I did was wrong,” she said. “She was just so angry.” When Maddie died, “we really weren’t friends anymore,” she said, “not because I didn’t want to be her friend, because…she just couldn’t be with me.”
Another friend pointed out that Maddie had a tendency to push people away when she was hurting, but Treder-Wolff still had a hard time processing the loss. She was grieving for the death of a person, the loss of a friendship, and the rejection of intimacy that she assumed she could still have with Maddie at the end of her life.
Losing Friends in Midlife
Grieving in middle age can compound the emotions and thoughts that people are already experiencing. “We’re aware that we’re midlife, but losses are what really remind us,” said Dr. Nicole Washington, a psychiatrist who not long ago lost a friend of 35 years.
“When you’re in middle age, you’re caring for aging parents, you’re raising young adult children, and then here you are losing people,” Washington said. “You start thinking about your own mortality. It just hits a little different.” When we spoke, Dr. Washington’s friend had died only four months earlier, so grief was still fresh on her mind. They had known each other since the sixth grade. With time and changing life circumstances, they didn’t speak as often as they used to, but remained good friends.
“Sometimes we fail to realize how important our friends become to us,” Washington said. “These are the people that share some of your darkest, deepest secrets. These are the people that you joke about taking some of these stories to the grave,” she said, until it literally happens.
Another complication for many people is how removed from death and grieving society has become. According to Dr. Alan Wolfelt, the director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition in Colorado, “In centuries past, aging, illness, death, and grief were more a part of everyday life.”
What Makes Grieving Friends So Different?
Gen Xer Jessica Bowen, 49, is a licensed marriage and family therapist with expertise in grief and loss. I asked her whether grieving is different after the death of friends versus family.
“We’re fairly unequipped for what it means to process death that isn’t familial,” Bowen said. “When people have lost a spouse, or a parent, or a child, you’re losing a piece of your identity, too,” she said. When friends die, however, Bowen said people tend to compartmentalize their grief. “You may not be losing a role because you have so many other attachments: I’m still a mom, I’m still a partner, and I’m still a daughter.”
While family relationships can be complicated and messy, there are societal norms about what it means to lose a relative. When it’s a friend, your support network doesn’t necessarily know or understand the relationship you had to the person you lost.
Amanda Butler, another licensed marriage and family therapist, said she experienced this when comparing how she grieved her father’s death versus that of a friend. After her dad died, she, her mother, and her sister talked openly about it, and her friends understood. The family had a funeral and mourned together. When a friend of 15 years died unexpectedly, however, the friendship was complicated, and so was the grief and mourning.
Spencer was a real estate agent who helped Butler find a place to live. What started as a professional friendship became more personal. Sometime around the COVID-19 pandemic, Butler said Spencer sent her messages late at night asking to meet up for drinks, which made her uncomfortable, especially because he was married and had a kid. So she ignored them. “I don’t know what was going on in his life,” she said. She felt weird about it, and they drifted apart. Then one day in 2024, when Butler was 44, she opened Instagram and saw a post on Spencer’s account with his obituary.
He had died in a traffic incident, but she didn’t know any details because they didn’t have any friends in common that she could ask — a circumstance I’ve been through as well. She said she planned to attend the funeral at first, but none of her friends could go with her, so she decided against it. “I didn’t want to be a random woman showing up there alone having to talk to his wife or other family members who I probably met like once,” she said. “There was none of that official closure that comes with the funeral. I had to process it on my own.”
The Grief of Comparison
Despite assumptions about reaching a “midlife crisis,” coming into middle age is just as much a time of reckoning and reflection as it is of crisis.
As Butler grieved the death of her friend and thought about her own mortality, she started taking stock of where she was in life. “When I look at my life compared to his, he had everything that I could have ever wanted,” she said. “He was more successful than me in a lot of ways. In real estate, he made a ton of money. I’m not married but I’ve always wanted to be — it’s just never worked out that way. He had the marriage, the family, the business, and financial success.”
“He had his life together in a way that I don’t, and he was also very extroverted, very outgoing, everyone’s best friend. I’m more introverted and quiet,” she said. It brought her to a dark place. “If I were the one who died, would anyone even miss me? Would anyone even notice or care? Or what would anyone say about my life? I have nothing to show for my life. That was part of the grief, too. He had everything, and I have nothing, and that’s a shitty feeling to be left with.”
Assessing where we are in midlife is normal, but doing it through a veil of grief can accentuate or even distort it. Seeing the life of someone we love cut short puts mortality in sharp focus.
“In midlife, by this point, I always thought that it would look different for me — that I would be more successful, that I would be married — and it makes that midlife transition even harder,” Butler said. “Then I lost this person who did have all the ‘right’ kind of midlife qualifications.” And yet he didn’t get to enjoy them into old age.
Turning Grief Into Mourning
Several experts spoke of the benefits of doing something with grief. In other words, mourning.
Dr. Wolfelt, the director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition, explained it well in a magazine article, where he wrote, “Grief is the internal meaning given to the experience of loss,” whereas mourning, by contrast, is “grief gone public.” Mourning is the actions you take, words you say, and tears you cry.
Mourning doesn’t have to be religious, though it usually is physical, symbolic, or done in community with others — or a combination of those. Therapist Jessica Bowen gave the example of getting together with a group of friends where each person holds a river stone and takes turns saying what their grief is, symbolically captured in the stone. Then everyone can throw the stones into a river or the ocean and watch nature take them away — or if that’s inconvenient, place them into a bowl of water instead.
Butler, who didn’t attend the funeral of her friend Spencer, said she sometimes lights a candle to remember him. Another person I interviewed for this article, Melanie Lutz, traveled to Ireland after her friend Shannon died. She, alongside Shannon’s husband and a few other close friends, scattered the cremains at the Cliffs of Moher. The trip was something of an extended ceremony. Gestures give grief somewhere to go.
Simply talking about the person and the grief you feel after their death is mourning, too. Dr. Washington said she sees a reluctance for people to do so, especially around the holidays. “We spend so much time avoiding having the conversation, sharing the memories,” she said. “Are we doing our best not to talk about them because we don’t want to upset anybody? Or are we trying not to make people cry?” she said.
“We try so hard to push the memories out because we see them as painful,” Washington said, “but to me, those holes are really only as big as the space that the person filled.”
The Confrontational Nature of Grief in Midlife
As life expectancy increases and our experiences with death (hopefully) are fewer and fewer in the first half of life, grief becomes starkly confrontational in midlife. “If midlife is this entry into ‘I have to be able to grapple with my own mortality,’ if we won’t sit with what grief means when we lose other people, then we can’t actually be in relationship to ourselves,” Bowen said.
The physicality it takes to get there can be intense, and it’s not something everyone learns. “What is it like to just hold the grief?” Bowen asked. “What does it feel like to express the grief, to cry, to scream, to move your body in these ways? …Grief can be such a heady thing, and to really feel it in your body, or even to imagine the relationship with the person, imagine a conversation with your departed loved one and then allow the stuff to really flow. Who was ever fricking taught that?”