John Milham | Coach / Trainer / Volunteer / Advocate

Is the meaning of Death to learn the meaning of Life?

Here we are. She's gone, and I'm not. Left alone after 12 months of battle, and now overwhelmingly immersed into my darkest panic of losing someone you can't imagine living without, feeling in desperation that she is going to stop breathing, while I am going to keep breathing, yet not knowing if I can without her, and that this is the worst injustice the universe could ever throw at you.

I had no idea how I was going to sort that out. Talk about being placed out of my comfort zone. I had been teleported to a state of complete incompetence. I had been left with three kids and was in no way prepared or capable.

We had never anticipated me staying, and her going. It didn't fit with anything. It wasn't logical. It didn't match our lifestyles. And even more than that, it was such an unreasonable act and expectation from the universe, from God. It was totally unreasonable.

She was the good person. She was real and honest and pure and beautiful. She was the person who deserved a long and happy existence. She had worked hard. She had suffered. Her traumas were real, and she needed and deserved a rest, and the whole injustice of it still burns me.

But I was here. So, what does this mean? How do I make some sense out of the insensible? How do I move while sunk into concrete boots of grief and fear holding me still? How do I throw off the fog and confusion of being left without the person I needed most?

And that's where it happens. It's where you learn what the meaning of death might be about—that it might be little to do with the person who has died and everything to do with the people who are left, who must solve these problems or disappear themselves.

Whether or not I lived on was touch and go for a while because I couldn't find anything that looked like meaning at first. It wasn't obvious. I had to find a way to engage with the search for that meaning in a way no one had ever taught. How can I hope to be effective in discovering the purpose of something so mysterious that philosophers have debated over this for thousands of years? And all done when I was left with half a brain and bugger all other stuff functioning correctly.

So no plan, just slowly persisting through the repetition of lying down and getting up, with the bloody mindedness of not dying, but instead choosing to look at myself rather than hide, and maybe in the future seeing more breaths being taken, finding more love, being more man, and that it might be possible, and in that possible, I might find an acknowledgement of self, of my own strength, of my own courage and truth and the belief that there is a way, and then a better way.

At some point on that path if we choose to live and not fade, one starts to see a hint of the meaning of death, a hint of how to keep going and maybe even in that hint, a hope for something more like real living.

The truth at this point, nearly two decades later, is that her dying was the making of my life. And the stupidity of saying that burns me, but it's true. She died, and it turned me into a much greater version of myself.

The lessons she allowed me to find through the sacrifice of her own life, whether she had a hand in it or not, were lessons that allowed me to achieve a higher place in my existence, and the new way that opened because of her handing the task to me alone. She asked me to find a truthful identity, and a purpose, and a being, that I could not even have imagined possible in those early naive days.

I have learned so much. Firstly, how to keep breathing, then how to turn my pain into purpose, how to survive it all, how to become someone who sees more when given less, how to be someone who values others more than himself, how to be someone who can help without demanding payment.

I love the gifts I've been given. I honour the pain, the effort, the sadness, the guilt, the shame and all that it has cost me, simply because all those things pale into nothing compared to the cost that she paid for me to achieve it.

And yet, in all of this gratitude, there remains one unassailable, constant, forever truth and that is at any point and at any cost, given the chance, I would swap places in an instant.

—John Milham (2026)

Editor’s note: After his wife’s death, John, left his corporate IT career to focus on mental health advocacy. Having overcome grief, depression, and anxiety, John now supports others through life’s challenges. He collaborates with groups like Kintsugi Heroes, Parents Beyond Breakup, and Mentoring Men, emphasizing men’s mental health, suicide prevention, and community-led peer support. His work promotes non-clinical interventions, coaching, and education, leveraging lived experience to create impactful mental health programs.

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