'My husband thought he was putting on weight. The truth would upend our lives.'

Our third child Orlando was only six months old when I noticed something wasn't quite right with my husband. Mauro's belly looked strange. Puffy and swollen, I initially thought he was just putting on weight but over time I became more and more concerned. 

As our discussions bounced from worried wife tropes to the stereotypical 'she'll be right' Aussie attitude, three months had passed by the time I finally convinced him to go to the doctor. By then it was too late. Tests found a tumour in his kidney that had already metastasized and cancer was spreading throughout his body. That 'extra weight'? It was ascites, the body's fluid response to advanced cancer.

Over the next 15 months, I watched as the cancer slowly snatched my beautiful husband away.

I fell in love with Mauro 10 years prior in a club in Darlinghurst. He was unlike anyone I'd ever met. A gentle giant from Milan, he was a creative soul with long, corkscrew blonde curly hair.

We fell in love fast and lived life at full volume. We got married at the same time we launched our boutique branding agency. Nine months later our daughter Mya arrived, followed by our son Leio, four years later and Orlando shortly after that.

Managing all the spinning plates was its own brand of delightful, chaotic bliss until Mauro's cancer diagnosis upended our entire lives.

Orlando turned two in January 2011, and a few short weeks later, on 11 February, Mauro died.

Suddenly I was a single parent to three kids under seven, with a business to run solo.

Mauro and I hadn't put anything in place. We hadn't had any conversations about what would happen if he didn't survive his illness. We never discussed how I would raise our children once he was gone. We hadn't even talked about a will, let alone prepared one. As a result, I felt wholly unprepared for what I was about to face. 

Emotionally, I felt all the ramifications of grief that you would expect to experience. But along with the desolate heartbreak, I also felt abandoned, resentful and angry that we had let all of those missed opportunities - for connection, for conversation, for love and life planning - just slip by.

At the same time, I wanted to reassure my kids that their mum was coping and that we all would be fine. I also had to keep the business afloat. There were staff wages to pay, and mortgage payments to keep on top of. I was acutely aware that, as a newly single parent, this business was my sole source of income.  

Those first few months were a difficult blur. I only got through it with the support of family and friends; my sister was my rock and a friend gently watched my wine consumption with a careful eye. We agreed that as long as I could close the lid on the recycling bin, we were ok.

Grief is a storm, but what follows—the paperwork, the calls, the cold indifference of bureaucracy—is a slow, grinding erosion. When my husband died, I was left to navigate a life I barely recognised, stumbling through the dark with three small children who needed me to make sense of the incomprehensible. As we clung to each other, trying to reshape what our "new normal" even meant, the reality of what needed to be done crept in: banks, insurance companies, government. This was "Sadmin"—the sad, heartless administration of loss. A process as heavy as the grief itself.

Watch: How to deal with grief from the loss of our loved ones. Post continues after video.

Anyone who has faced it knows the devastation of placing your loved one's death certificate on a counter in front of a stranger—at the bank, at Service NSW, everywhere. You see the moment of confusion, the shift to discomfort, and then, finally, pity. Your life's most painful chapter is reduced to a single A4 page that the world needs to verify again and again, an endless ritual that demands you reopen the wound, every time, just to move forward.

It was only after 18 months, once the emotional and mental fog started to clear that I started reflecting on everything I'd been through and all I wished had been different.

The last year of Mauro's life had been a mess.

We were trying to keep the business going and be parents to our kids, all while ignoring the elephant in the room. Mauro's severely declining health.

During this time there were discussions of miracle treatments overseas and illusive 'hope scripts.' He bounced in and out of the hospital: emergency room visits, painful treatments, invasive procedures, aggressive surgeries then back home. Only to repeat the cycle all over again.

Within all of this avoidance and uncertainty, we just couldn't find the language to discuss the reality of our future. We didn't know how to broach the seriousness of it all. I felt it was an act of betrayal to raise it during a time when my husband needed my hope, strength and positivity, not my fears.

In retrospect, I think if we had been able to find the words and the strength to have those tender conversations, Mauro would have told me he didn't want the invasive treatments. That he didn't want to be in the hospital for weeks on end. That the precious time he had left would be better spent at home,  with our little family. Soaking up our babies, making memories, making videos, writing letters for the milestones he would never celebrate with them. And his death wouldn't have been the highly clinical and impersonal experience it ended up as. 

So when, 18 months after Mauro died, I was introduced to a not-for-profit that helped people reimagine what their last stage of life would look like, I jumped at the chance to work with them.

While 70 per cent of us want to die at home, the vast majority of us won't get our final wish.

Most people want to be surrounded by friends and family in the comfort, love, warmth and familiarity of home. The stark reality is, that 1 in 2 of us will pass away in a hospital, our least preferred place to die. 

Alongside the fact that many of these hospital stays are unwanted, unplanned and unnecessary, hospitals are simply not designed to care for dying patients. Many patients undergo treatments and interventions that don't benefit them in their final moments.

As a result, many Australians are not having the experience that they want, and deserve.  

Losing a loved one is a universal experience we will all face. Often many times over.

Despite this, we're still ill-equipped to talk about it. Where we've made amazing strides in our understanding of key life experiences from puberty and pregnancy to mental health and menopause, death is still considered the last taboo. 

Much of the turmoil and trauma can be avoided by having open and honest conversations with our loved ones about their wishes and priorities. By taking the time for tender exploration to understand what matters most through the last stages of life. Rather than a once-and-done exercise, these are dynamic conversations that prioritise progress over perfection. There is no right way to go about it. Ultimately you need to understand what's important to each other - with the knowledge that it is a conversation you can return to if priorities change.

For people facing the end of their lives, it is an opportunity to make important decisions about how, and where to spend their time - as time becomes the most precious thing.

And for those in a caring role, these tender conversations can lead to more resilience and fewer regrets, strengthened by the knowledge that their loved ones' preferences were honoured to the best of everyone's ability.  

By opening the doors for these conversations, we're more able to help our loved ones have the dignified and compassionate death that we all want and deserve.

Melissa Reader is an advocate for better outcomes through the last stage of life and is the Founder and CEO of Violet.

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Feature image: Supplied.