Paul, Australia

You call that a mid-life crisis? This is a mid-life crisis!

What happens when the crisis isn’t an optional existential diversion, but a crushing reality that you have no choice but to navigate?

Midlife crises, we have been led to believe by media and culture, are the stuff of existential unraveling; the questioning of identity, the pursuit of validation, and a misguided scramble for reinvention. Questions like “is this the life I want?”, are answered with sports cars, marathons, career pivots, or affairs (or all of the above).

For me, midlife arrived with a diagnosis.

In June, 2013, my wife, Madeleine, the love of my life since my early twenties, was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia. A disease we had been told is relatively common in men in their 70s (17 per 100,000), but incredibly rare for women in their 40s (1.5 in 100,000).

After four months of full time chemotherapy, which included extended three week admissions in hospital, she went into remission. The remission lasted nearly three years, during which we did our best to resume our lives, finding moments of normalcy (I’ve written about this elsewhere).

But the disease returned, and she underwent the challenging process of a stem cell transplant. In 2017, at the age of 44, she died with me and our a daughters sitting on her hospital bed in the Royal Melbourne ICU, holding her hand, telling her how much we loved her.

This wasn’t the crisis I expected to confront in midlife.

But what I learned in those years since is that a true midlife crisis doesn’t drive you toward reinvention, it humbles you into reexamination. Mad’s illness and death didn’t prompt me to question who I was; it forced me to understand what it means to be human.

Grief has a way of obliterating ego.

There’s no room for vanity when you’re helping someone navigate chemotherapy, grabbing warm blankets while they rigor, or sitting vigil in a hospital room. I wasn’t the protagonist in this story; I was the supporting cast. And as the future I had envisioned of the life of raising our daughters Katia and Jemima together, travelling, and growing old side by side, was ripped away, I realised how little control I had over the things that mattered most.

The loss wasn’t just of my wife and life-partner, but of the life we’d imagined together. It was a grief that hollowed me out, leaving space only for the question; how do I keep going?

The answer came slowly, in the smallest of gestures. It came in listening more, judging less, and recognising that every person I encountered carried burdens I couldn’t see. It came in rejecting the idea that we are defined by our achievements or acquisitions and embracing the notion that we are shaped by our compassion.

Grief stripped away the extraneous and left me with clarity. Mad’s life was one of love, kindness, curiosity, warmth, and connection, and if I were to honour her, I had to embody those values myself.

In the years since her death, I’ve thought often about the midlife crises I’ve seen others experience. They seem, to me, to be less about the pursuit of novelty and more about the avoidance of vulnerability. A flashy car or a whirlwind affair may be an antidote to the terrifying reality of life’s brevity, but they don’t require introspection.

Real crisis demands that you sit with discomfort. It demands that you confront your frailty and your limits. It demands that you grow.

I am not the man I was before Mad’s diagnosis. I am a version of that man, but probably more willing to embrace complexity, the unknown, the existential reality of what Robert Kegan calls the “subject-object shift,” where I am able to step outside my own perspective, see myself more clearly, and hold the complexities of life with greater compassion and curiosity. A profound acceptance of life’s paradoxes, limitations, and the necessity of finding meaning beyond the material or superficial.

The man I am now is quieter, more measured, and so much more understanding (but of course, I have my moments when I am not — I’m only human). I resist the impulse to become defensive when faced with differing perspectives, striving instead to approach them with curiosity and grace.

Grief remade me, but not in the way I expected. I think it made me kinder, more sanguine. It didn’t leave me broken; it left me open.

Open to the complexities of others. Open to the idea that the world isn’t divided into successes and failures but is a web of interconnected struggles and triumphs. Open to the knowledge that kindness, being gentle to myself and others, and being accepting isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity.

I’m more willing to accept that I can’t control everything. There’s a kind of liberation in letting go of the illusion of control. In recognising that life doesn’t always follow the script you’d written or imagined. This acceptance has made me calmer, more present in the moment, and more attuned to what truly matters.

Paradoxically, alongside this acceptance, I also have hope. It’s not the naïve hope of believing that everything will work out as planned, but a quieter, steadier kind of hope. The belief that even in uncertainty, there is the possibility of joy, connection, and meaning.

I like to think that Mad would have wanted this version of me.

She would have wanted me to live fully, to find joy in small moments, and to meet others with compassion. She showed me every day that the truest measure of a life isn’t what you acquire or accomplish but how you make others feel.

My midlife crisis was a reinvention of sorts, but I think it was more of an awakening. It didn’t lead me to a convertible (although I did consider a Karmann Ghia for a while) or a drastic career change, but to a deeper understanding of what it means to live a meaningful life. It led me to realise that my job, my career, or any external marker of success doesn’t define me.

Instead, it forced me to ask a different kind of question, not what car, job, or achievement I want, but what kind of life I want to live. I came to understand that these things that are portrayed as salves to mid-life crises are merely uncontrollable links to something deeper, the relationships, values, and moments that truly make life meaningful. This awakening taught me that a meaningful life isn’t built on things, but on how you show up in the world .

What I’ve learned is that life is unbearably fragile, astonishingly short, and breathtakingly beautiful.

And while I can’t bring Mad back, I can honour her by becoming the best version of myself.