The worst, though, came in February 2022, when Cherry called him and said four words that hit like a high note gone wrong: \u201cI have cancer.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cherry, 33 at the time, had been diagnosed with a tumor while six months pregnant with Jupiter. The doctors\u2019 guidance only sharpened the pain: the tumor couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cShe\u2019s fine, she had the operation,\u201d Sheeran told the podcast, breathing out the words as if he\u2019s still catching his breath years later. \u201cShe was pregnant at the time. That\u2019s why it was difficult. She had the operation to remove the tumor after the birth of our second child. And thankfully \u2014 knock on wood \u2014 totally fine.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n For him, the memory of that period still feels like a long storm. \u201cIt was f\u2013ing scary,\u201d he admitted, his candor echoing the raw honesty he brings to his music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the tumor wasn\u2019t 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 \u201cShape of You\u201d entered its final, high\u2011pressure phase. On the same day the trial began, cricket legend Shane Warne died. \u201cThat was probably the worst week because Jamal died that week as well, and then we went straight into a court case,\u201d Sheeran said. \u201cOh, and then Shane died, first day of the court case.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. \u201cBeing in the courtroom though \u2014 which, like, everything was building to that for like, eight years \u2014 and then suddenly when you\u2019re in the courtroom, it didn\u2019t really matter,\u201d he said. \u201cI 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, \u2018I don\u2019t actually care about the outcome of this.\u2019 Because it\u2019s so small compared.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In his 2023 Disney+ documentary\u00a0Ed Sheeran: The Sum of It All<\/em>, Cherry opened up more about why she chose to step into the spotlight despite usually avoiding it. \u201cI got diagnosed with cancer at the start of the year which was a massive s\u2013ter,\u201d she said. \u201cIt made me massively reflect on our mortality. I would never agree to do anything like this, but it made me think, \u2018Oh, if I died, what\u2019s people\u2019s perception of me? What do you leave behind?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing you can do about it. You feel so powerless,\u201d he said. \u201cAmid the stress and grief he was experiencing, Sheeran said he began feeling like he \u2018didn\u2019t want to live anymore.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s a line that cuts through the brightly mixed production of his image: the cheeky boy from Framlingham, the record\u2011breaking global pop star, the one everyone assumes is \u201cfine.\u201d He didn\u2019t hide it. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing you can do about it. You feel so powerless,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I have had that throughout my life. \u2026 You\u2019re under the waves drowning. You\u2019re just sort of in this thing. And you can\u2019t get out of it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n He also admitted he felt shame about those thoughts, especially as a father. \u201cI feel really embarrassed about it,\u201d he said, the sentence heavy with the weight of someone who\u2019s learned that being \u201cstrong\u201d sometimes means saying, \u201cI\u2019m not strong right now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Music, once again, became his life raft. In the wake of Cherry\u2019s diagnosis, he wrote seven songs in four hours. \u201cWhen something really intense happens to him, he writes a song,\u201d Cherry said in the documentary. In the Rolling Stone profile, Ed explained the same idea differently: \u201cWriting 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The whole ordeal reshaped the direction of his album Subtract<\/em>, pushing aside years of work and replacing them with material drawn straight from the darkest, most honest corners of his life. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2014songs like \u201cThree\u201d and \u201cPlastic Bag,\u201d and the heavier, quieter ones that came with Subtract<\/em>\u2014are reminders of where they\u2019ve been and how far they\u2019ve climbed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For fans, the story of Ed and Cherry\u2019s 2022 \u201cyear from hell\u201d doesn\u2019t just deepen the way we hear the lyrics; it also shows why the smallest moments\u2014walking their daughters to the park, the soft hum of a guitar at home, the way he looks at her across the stage\u2014can 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\u2014and then, slowly, into something even more powerful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s the terrible, beautiful truth of his life right now: the same man who wrote \u201cThinking Out Loud\u201d is still learning how to live it, one day, one song, and one embrace at a time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For fans, Ed Sheeran\u2019s life has always felt like a story built from songs: big choruses, quiet bridges,…\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":21200,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-21197","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-musician"},"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/artgardenhub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/image-241-1024x768.png\")
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