For fans, Ed Sheeran’s life has always felt like a story built from songs: big choruses, quiet bridges, and the kind of emotions that translate into records. But the chapter he’s been living since 2022 is one that no chart, no crowd, no single could ever do justice to. It’s a chapter written in hospital corridors, in whispers between “I’m scared” and “I’m here,” and in the quiet hum of a guitar at 3 a.m.

Speaking on the Friends Keep Secrets podcast in March 2026, Sheeran retraced the moment his world tilted. When asked to name the best and worst days of his life, it was clear even before he answered that the two answers were tethered tightly. The best, he said, was his 2019 wedding to Cherry Seaborn, the Englishwoman he met again years after childhood friendship and turned into the center of his life. Today, they’re the parents of Lyra, 5, and Jupiter, 3, two girls who anchor his voice, his stability, and his reason.

The worst, though, came in February 2022, when Cherry called him and said four words that hit like a high note gone wrong: “I have cancer.”

Cherry, 33 at the time, had been diagnosed with a tumor while six months pregnant with Jupiter. The doctors’ guidance only sharpened the pain: the tumor couldn’t be operated on until after she gave birth, which meant the couple had to carry on through the final stretch of the pregnancy with the weight of surgery hanging over them.

“She’s fine, she had the operation,” Sheeran told the podcast, breathing out the words as if he’s still catching his breath years later. “She was pregnant at the time. That’s why it was difficult. She had the operation to remove the tumor after the birth of our second child. And thankfully — knock on wood — totally fine.”

For him, the memory of that period still feels like a long storm. “It was f–ing scary,” he admitted, his candor echoing the raw honesty he brings to his music.

But the tumor wasn’t the only shadow in that time. Weeks later, he lost his close friend and early mentor, Jamal Edwards, the music entrepreneur who helped launch his career. The grief of that loss arrived just as the court case over his 2017 hit “Shape of You” entered its final, high‑pressure phase. On the same day the trial began, cricket legend Shane Warne died. “That was probably the worst week because Jamal died that week as well, and then we went straight into a court case,” Sheeran said. “Oh, and then Shane died, first day of the court case.”

The lawsuit, which had loomed over him for years, suddenly shrank in scale next to the fear of losing his wife and the grief of losing his friend. “Being in the courtroom though — which, like, everything was building to that for like, eight years — and then suddenly when you’re in the courtroom, it didn’t really matter,” he said. “I had built it up in my mind and then because of all of those actual heavy life things had happened, when I was in the courtroom I was like, ‘I don’t actually care about the outcome of this.’ Because it’s so small compared.”

In his 2023 Disney+ documentary Ed Sheeran: The Sum of It All, Cherry opened up more about why she chose to step into the spotlight despite usually avoiding it. “I got diagnosed with cancer at the start of the year which was a massive s–ter,” she said. “It made me massively reflect on our mortality. I would never agree to do anything like this, but it made me think, ‘Oh, if I died, what’s people’s perception of me? What do you leave behind?’”

For Ed, the experience unraveled layers of his own mental health. In the Rolling Stone cover story, he admitted that the feeling of helplessness was overwhelming. “There’s nothing you can do about it. You feel so powerless,” he said. “Amid the stress and grief he was experiencing, Sheeran said he began feeling like he ‘didn’t want to live anymore.’”

It’s a line that cuts through the brightly mixed production of his image: the cheeky boy from Framlingham, the record‑breaking global pop star, the one everyone assumes is “fine.” He didn’t hide it. “There’s nothing you can do about it. You feel so powerless,” he said. “And I have had that throughout my life. … You’re under the waves drowning. You’re just sort of in this thing. And you can’t get out of it.”

He also admitted he felt shame about those thoughts, especially as a father. “I feel really embarrassed about it,” he said, the sentence heavy with the weight of someone who’s learned that being “strong” sometimes means saying, “I’m not strong right now.”

Music, once again, became his life raft. In the wake of Cherry’s diagnosis, he wrote seven songs in four hours. “When something really intense happens to him, he writes a song,” Cherry said in the documentary. In the Rolling Stone profile, Ed explained the same idea differently: “Writing songs is my therapy. It helps me make sense of my feelings. I wrote without thought of what the songs would be, I just wrote whatever tumbled out.”

The whole ordeal reshaped the direction of his album Subtract, pushing aside years of work and replacing them with material drawn straight from the darkest, most honest corners of his life. It’s the difference between writing about love and heartbreak in the abstract, and writing about love while staring at the possibility that the person who anchors it might be taken away.

Now, three years later, the scars are still there, but the song continues. Cherry is healthy. The children are growing. The trial is over. The friends lost are still missed, but the music—songs like “Three” and “Plastic Bag,” and the heavier, quieter ones that came with Subtract—are reminders of where they’ve been and how far they’ve climbed.

For fans, the story of Ed and Cherry’s 2022 “year from hell” doesn’t just deepen the way we hear the lyrics; it also shows why the smallest moments—walking their daughters to the park, the soft hum of a guitar at home, the way he looks at her across the stage—can feel like a small victory. In a way, every note he sings now carries the echo of that tumor, that pregnancy, those sleepless nights, and that one pivotal phone call that turned the best chapters into the hardest ones—and then, slowly, into something even more powerful.

It’s the terrible, beautiful truth of his life right now: the same man who wrote “Thinking Out Loud” is still learning how to live it, one day, one song, and one embrace at a time.