She found this book and put it somewhere for him to read. It could've been on the kitchen counter, at his bedside or in the car.
She placed it somewhere he would find it and she didn't need to explain why. He knows what it means.
This book is written for that man who picked it up.
He is a middle-aged Gen X father - somewhere in his late forties to mid-fifties - and his adult son has drifted into a different orbit to him.
There has been no fight. There has been no tragedy.
But life has accumulated around both of them and the distance between them became the default.
Their conversations stayed on the surface. Their time spent together became staged: dinners, family get-togethers, celebrations.
He knows something is missing.
He just doesn't know what to do about it.
While There's Still Time is the book for this man.
The father who knows he is past due doing something about reaching the adult stranger who is called a son to him.
Written by a son whose own father passed before he could repair his relationship with him - by someone who carries the weight of what was never quite said between him and his father before it was too late - this is the map the author wishes someone had placed in his father's hands.
It traces the distance drift clearly and without blame, from the inter-generational inheritance of the grandfather's post first and second world war silence through the father's inheritance to the son's quiet adjustment of expectations. It shows exactly what the son is carrying that the father doesn't yet know about. And then, chapter by chapter, it shows what the father must do to write a new script..
It does this, not through grandiose speeches nor idealistic hype, but through something more durable than that.
This book will show fathers:
- the crucial low-key first move he has to make
- the timed follow-up question
- the courageous phone call for no reason
- how to willingly stay in the conversation to reach a new comfort level
This book has no worksheets, no affirmations, no five-step plans. There is a conversation between the like-minded: direct, warm, honest about the difficulty and the possibility, in equal measure. It's a conversation between a son author who has been on the son's side of this kind of distance between a father and son, and a reader father who still has time to close it with his own son.
The window doesn't close. But it does get smaller.
The third volume of the Ground Zero Series, While There's Still Time follows Finding Ground Zero and Never Too Late To Dream in their exploration of what it means for middle aged, Gen X men to live with intention, purpose and connection in the second half of life.
This book is for the father who is ready to stop waiting and who knows that unless he reaches out now, regret will set in.
