131: Keep Those Feet Moving: Grief, Fatherhood, and Starting Over with AJ Coleman

A Simple Therapy Podcast:

Honest Conversations on Therapy, Mental Health, Healing and Self-Growth.

In this episode of A Simple Therapy Podcast, Sindee Gozansky welcomes AJ Coleman, author of Keep Those Feet Moving: A Widower’s Eight-Step Guide to Coping with Grief and Thriving Against All Odds. When AJ was in what he thought was the prime of his life, his wife Cory lost her battle with brain cancer at just 33-years-old, leaving him a single father to their one-year-old daughter, Zoey. What followed was a crash course in grief, single parenthood, and the quiet, relentless work of rebuilding a life. Rather than stay silent, AJ turned his journey into a book—one that became unexpectedly therapeutic, forcing him to confront insecurities and hard truths he hadn’t planned to share with the world.

Sindee and AJ trace the full arc of his story: the whirlwind romance with Cory, the devastating diagnosis, and the tender, often unglamorous reality of raising Zoey alone—forms with no “widower” box, school letters addressed to a mother who wasn’t there, and the quiet overcompensation of a dad determined not to fail. AJ speaks with candor about the guilt of eventually moving on, the conversation with a nine-year-old Zoey that cracked him open, and what it took to finally say yes to love again. Woven throughout is the insight that his whole life—the hearing impairment, the anxiety, the job loss—had been preparing him for this. That nothing was wasted. That the hardest setbacks signal the greatest rewards waiting on the other side.

This is a conversation for anyone sitting inside a loss they can’t see their way through—therapists and clients alike. AJ’s framework is practical and his delivery is warm, but what lingers is something harder to name: the quiet insistence that mourning is not the enemy of healing, it’s the beginning of it. His invitation is simple and earned—stop waiting to feel ready, accept the mourning, find your closure, and keep those feet moving.

00:49 – Meet AJ Coleman

03:06 – Cory: The Love Story

06:40 – The Decision to Start a Family

09:06 – Raising Zoey: Keeping Her Mother’s Memory Alive

11:31 – The Invisible Obstacles of Widowed Parenthood

14:58 – Resilience Forged Before the Loss

17:17 – The Keep Those Feet Moving Philosophy

18:08 – Closure: Why It Matters and How to Find It

23:37 – The Book, the Healing, and Going Deeper

31:21 – What It Means to Touch a Life

37:53 – Letting Go of the Past Without Erasing It

47:07 – Guilt, Remarriage, and Learning to Love Again