While There is Still Time - Ground Zero Series, #3

She placed the book 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 father 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 is 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 father passed before he could repair his relationship with him, this is the map the author wishes someone had placed in his father's hands. It's a conversation with someone who carries the weight of what was never quite said between him and his father before it was too late.

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 of it, 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 for them both. It does this, not through grandiose speeches nor idealistic hype, but through something more durable than that.

This book will show fathers:

This book has no worksheets, no affirmations, no five-step plans. There is just 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 is 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.