Seeing Death Clearly Episode with Jill Mclennen & AJ Coleman
Jill McClennen is a Certified Death Doula and InSight Certified Funeral Celebrant. She guides individuals and families through life’s final chapter with compassion, clarity, and heart, helping them navigate end-of-life care, grief, and meaningful ceremony.
Podcast Excerpt- Seeing Death Clearly with Jill Mclennen
Guest: AJ Coleman
In a recent episode of Seeing Death Clearly, host Jill McClennen sits down with author AJ Coleman for an honest and heartfelt conversation about the ripple effects of loss. Together, they explore how death reshapes relationships with family and friends, the often unspoken social discomfort that follows, and the weight of anticipatory grief. AJ shares his own perspective as a widower and author of Keep Those Feet Moving, offering inishgts on resilience and the ongoing process of learning to live with grief. This discussion sheds light on the challenges many face but rarely talk about, while reminding us that healing is not about “moving on,” but about finding the strength to move forward.
“We all imagine ‘old people’ when we think of widows & widowers.”
“You know,” AJ begins softly, “we all imagine old people when we think of widows and widowers.” There’s a pause- one of those quiet moments where the weight of truth settles into the room. “We picture gray hair, long marriages, years of memories. We don’t picture a 30-something dad standing in a dim hospital hallway, holding a one-year-old on his hip, trying to understand how life just broke in half.”
AJ goes on to share the early days after losing his wife to brain cancer-those disorienting weeks when grief wasn’t a distant concept but a daily reality that lived in the house with him.
“I had this tiny little girl who needed bottles, naps, diaper changes…and who had no idea the world just shifted. And then there was me-trying to be her dad, her safe place-while feeling completely untethered. Grief didn’t give me time to process. It didn’t give me space. It just demanded I keep moving, keep showing up.”
Jill gently asks him what fatherhood looked like in that first year without his wife.
“It was messy, he admits. “It was learning how to soothe her cries while hiding my own. It was figuring out how to plan a funeral and a first birthday in the same breath. It was the strange realization that people looked at me like I was too young to be a widower, like there must’ve been some mistake. But grief has no age requirement. It doesn’t wait until you’ve lived a full life. Sometimes it comes when you’re just getting started.”
He talks about his loneliness- not just of losing a partner, but stepping into a role no one expects a young man to inhabit.
“When you’re a young widowed parent, you walk into rooms and you’re the only one. The support groups, the books, the conversations-they’re not written with you in mind. I felt like I was navigating a life stage decades before my time. But my daughter…she became my lifeline. She gave me something to reach for when everything else felt impossible.”
On Friendship, Loss, and the Quiet Drift
As the conversation deepens, AJ opens up about the unexpected shifts in friendships after his wife passed.
“It used to be the both of us, he says referring to his late wife. We were a pair. We had couple friends, traditions, people we did life with. But after she died, things changed. Some friends stuck around, but others slowly drifted. Not because they didn’t care- just because grief can be uncomfortable. It can be too much for people who don’t know what to say or how to show up.”
He pauses before continuing, “And honestly, I didn’t know how to show up either. I was surviving. I wasn’t the same guy I was before. And friendships…they don’t always survive that kind of shift.”
AJ shares how that loneliness pushed him inward, searching for a place to put the pain, the confusion, and the pieces of himself he didn’t recognize.
“Writing became that place,” he says. “I didn’t have the same support system I once had, but I had a pen, a notebook, and a need to make sense of my own story. That’s where Keep Those Feet Moving came from. It was me trying to figure out how a widowed father rebuilds. I didn’t write it because I had everything figured out- I wrote it because I didn’t. And somewhere in that process, I found support, connection and purpose bigger than the grief.”
Moving Forward with Love and Clarity
As the conversation unfolds, AJ reflects on the clarity that comes when you confront death so early in adulthood: the way it sharpens your understanding of time, of love, of what truly matters.
“Losing my wife so young didn’t just change me as a man-it changed me as a father. I learned to hold joy and pain at the same time. I learned that grief and love can coexist. And I learned that even in the darkest season, my daughter and I could build a new life that honors her mom every single day.”
Instagram: @endoflifeclarity
A Death Doula Podcast on Death and Dying - Seeing Death Clearly — End Of Life Clarity
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE HERE
Seeing Death Clearly is a show that challenges you to think about your beliefs about death, dying, grief, and living life. I am your host, Jill McClennen, a death doula and end-of-life coach. As a death doula, I found through first-hand experience that the more I came to terms with my thoughts and feelings about death and dying, the more present I became in my everyday life and I hope to share that with you too, how you can live a better life by having a healthier relationship with death and dying. Each episode features a guest who shares their beliefs and stories about death and dying. These are honest conversations about a topic most of us avoided talking about our entire lives. I am on a mission to change that, one conversation at a time.