Søren Gade - Live fra Viborg

When Søren Gade’s wife Helle was dying of cancer, their last conversation was about a dead animal on the wall. Gade had always wanted to hang a trophy buck there; Helle had always hated the idea. In her final hours, she gave him permission. After she died, Gade’s daughters overheard him telling a friend he wouldn’t do it—that it felt wrong. They took the hammer and hung it themselves. “That was something,” Gade says quietly. It is the kind of story he tells without sentimentality but with a precise, almost clinical honesty about grief, love, and the small arrangements that carry huge weight.

A childhood shaped by absence and a stepfather’s quiet authority

Gade was born in Holstebro in 1963. His parents divorced when he was young, and his biological father disappeared from his life. For years, Gade did not miss him—until his future wife Helle pressed him to make contact. When he finally met his father again at age 10, the man had built a new life. Gade never formed a deep attachment. “I’ve never missed Paul,” he says plainly. What shaped him instead was his stepfather, Jens Otto Grau, a man who never raised his voice and never scolded. If Gade and his brother misbehaved, Grau would simply say, “That would make your mother sad.” It worked better than any punishment. “He got more and more power over us,” Gade recalls. “Because everything he said was right.” That early lesson