Everything changed. Stage three melanoma turned into stage four when the cancer spread to his brain, and Gianni became a ticking time bomb.

Within a year of their wedding, Gianni (left) was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Source: Supplied

When I thought things couldn’t get any worse, they did.

“Maybe you can find a new way of loving me,” Gianni texted before I turned my phone off for 10 days.

I needed to forgive my husband.

His lovers too had loved him

I’d been jealous of my husband’s lovers, but the intimacy of death belonged only to us.

Connecting gave us all a sense of relief and, for them, forgiveness.

A grief-averse culture

He couldn’t see that it took courage to allow myself to feel the full weight of grief. Numbing myself to it, running from it, might have been easier. But you can’t outrun grief. It will catch up with you, eventually.

I was shocked to discover that my secular, western culture was grief-averse, death our last taboo. We lack rituals and traditions to prepare for death and grief.

In suffering comes a choice

This is to discourage the ancient practice of pushing widows into their husband’s flames.

Family members and onlookers watch bodies burn on ghats by the Ganges River in Varanasi, India. Source: Getty / Andrew Holbrooke

In India, burning alive — willingly or unwillingly — on the banks of the Ganges is considered preferable for widows to the often-miserable fate that awaits them.

Being a widow in my culture still felt like a curse, albeit a lesser one. In both cultures you become excluded.

For Kerstin, travelling to India where death is “acknowledged and honoured” was a way to validate her grief. Source: Supplied

But the second arrow, I remembered, was my choice.