Midlife Chance: Welcome to My New 25 - Part 1
- evennow
- Apr 22
- 5 min read
A continuation of Midlife Crisis to Midlife Chance
Part 1 of 2: The Lineage, The Wound, and The Words That Had to Be Spoken
It started in the middle of the night. I woke up with a sudden inspiration, or rather, a feeling, the kind that lands in your chest before your brain has caught up: that today might be a significant date. That today, the 12th of April 2026, might be the day I had lived exactly as many days as my father did in his entire life.
So I did what any reasonable person does at some ungodly hour: I asked AI to calculate it.
My father was born on the 25th of April 1947. He died on the 23rd of August 2001. That is 19,844 days. I was born on the 11th of November 1971. Adding 19,844 days to that date gives you: the 11th of March 2026. A month earlier. I had already crossed that threshold without even knowing it. I lay there in the dark, and I felt something quietly enormous settle into place.
To understand why that number matters, I need to take you back a generation further, to my grandfather.
He was a remarkable man. Deeply spiritual, drawn to eastern philosophies, and a practising astrologer. He cast a horoscope for me when I was very young, and the only thing my mother remembers from it is that I am destined to be a leader. He died of cancer or possibly of something very similar to what would later take my father, at a time when medicine didn't yet have the language to name it properly. What I know of him is that he faced his dying with an openness that bordered on the mystical. He was clinically dead more than once on that journey, and came back each time. Since he died I have perceived him as my spiritual guide or guardian all through my life. As a side note, the picture above was taken when my father and I visited him on the island of Norderney in the North Sea, when I met my grandfather for the first time.
My father was his opposite in almost every way. Completely agnostic. Deeply practical. Not a spiritual bone in his body - or so he insisted. And yet, during the seven years of his own illness, an autoimmune disease that began as carpal tunnel syndrome and revealed itself to be Jo-1 syndrome - an unspecified connective tissue disease with visceral involvement - which progressively enlarged all his internal organs, he was placed into an induced coma three times. Each time, he had near-death experiences. He spoke of them immediately after coming out of the coma. Later, he would dismiss them as dreams. His armour went back on.
His lungs never recovered. He suffocated, slowly, over years. He was 54 when he died.
And I, who was almost a carbon copy of him, who had him as my primary caregiver in my earliest years, who worshipped him as a small child and fought him ferociously as an adult, I had taken on everything. His patterns. His defences. His limiting beliefs. His way of being in the world, which included the belief, somewhere deep and unexamined, that the body is something to be pushed past and not to be listened to.
When I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2019, I understood - not immediately, but in stages, with a clarity that deepened throughout my treatment - that his beliefs had lived in my body. That they had killed him. And that they were now trying to do the same to me.
That understanding became my fiercest motivation to finally, truly let them go.
My mother said it to me quite early on in my cancer journey, almost in passing: "You've even fallen ill at the same age as your father." She meant it with love and concern. But for me, it landed as confirmation. Not of doom, but of pattern. I was 47. So had he been, when his illness began. It was, in its own strange way, the final proof that I was indeed his carbon copy, and that if I wanted a different ending to the story, I had better get to work.
Years before my cancer diagnosis, while my father was still alive and still ill, I was trying to do something I knew I couldn't leave undone. I had wanted to be a priest. You cannot hold that aspiration and carry an open wound with your father unaddressed. So I was trying to reach him. Awkwardly, stubbornly, across years of battles and silences and the particular kind of love that gets so armoured it looks like combat. Every since my puberty my father and I had only fought, and for years we were not able to have a normal conversation.
One afternoon I was driving from Dortmund to Cologne when the radio played Shine On by Chris de Burgh. If you know my devotion to Chris and his music - and if you've read my other posts about it here and here - you won't be surprised that a lyric stopped me in my tracks. The line about saying all the words that should be spoken, before they are lost forever.
I had just finished a phone call with my father.
What I haven't told you yet is that following that song took a particular kind of courage. Because Chris de Burgh was the one thing my father never let me have in peace. He had nicknames for him. He mocked me, consistently and without mercy, for loving his music. It was one of the small, sharp ways the distance between us expressed itself - that the artist who moved me most deeply was the one my father found most ridiculous. And yet it was Chris's voice on the radio that day that sent me back to the phone. There is something almost poetic in that, though it took me years to see it.
I pulled over, metaphorically if not literally, and I called him back.
"Hello?" "It's me again. I forgot something." "What?" "I just wanted to tell you that I love you."
There was a pause.
"We already know that. Do you have anything else important to say?" "No."
And he hung up.
I had gathered every scrap of courage I had. I had reached across everything, the years of fighting, the hurt, the longing to hear it said back, and his response was: we already know that, do you have anything important to say?
It felt like a dagger. I have never forgotten that moment, even though I have forgotten almost everything else about my life before a certain point. And I am absolutely certain it hurt him just as much to say it as it hurt me to hear it. We were both operating from the same strategy: attack is the best defence. He simply couldn't drop it, not in that moment.
But here is what he did not say: he did not say he didn't love me. He said we already knew.
I followed a song. It hurt enormously. And I am so glad I did it. Because I said the words. That is what matters. And because of that moment, saying the unspoken thing - even when it's terrifying, even when the response is armoured - is something I carry into every room I work in now. A coach can only take someone as deep as they have gone themselves. I have been here. I know what it costs to leave things unsaid.
This is where the wound ends and the rebirth begins. Part 2 - the cancer, the bald head, the mystical night, and my new 25 - is coming very soon. Watch this space. 🌟
And if you're wondering what the song lyric says, here it is:
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