'I became a widow with teenage children. They saved me in ways I never expected.'

Lahra Carey and her husband Ben had just moved into their dream home. They'd renovated it together, celebrated his 50th birthday, and enjoyed a fabulous overseas trip. With three beautiful children and successful careers, life felt complete.

Speaking to Mamamia ahead of sharing her story on SBS Insight: Navigating Widowhood, Lahra said: "We were married for almost 17 years and together a couple of years before that.

"We had three kids who are all IVF kids. We worked to get through those times and had a fabulous life of travel. We were both busy professionals, raising young kids."

They were spending the Christmas break at their weekender on the Victorian coast when everything changed.

"What I've learned on this journey is there's a very different experience when it's a sudden death than when it's a long illness," Lahra explained.

Ben had gone paragliding with a friend when a bad gust of wind caused him to crash on a clifftop. Lahra was at the pool with their children — twin girls, aged 12 and their son, 13 — when she received the call.

"I work in crisis management and usually am sort of geared to expect the worst, but in that moment, I thought he had broken a bone or we'd have to spend the night in the hospital. I was told that he was still responsive," she said.

"Once we got on the road with my friend driving, I was thinking, 'Wait, what if this is really bad?' … There was this rising sense of kind of panic, but not knowing where to put that, I just had to get to him."

Lahra and Ben on holiday with their three children. Image: SBS.

By the time she arrived, Ben was unconscious. Medics were working on him while police bombarded Lahra with questions about their marriage and family.

"It was like a test, and I was thinking 'I have to get the answers right'... it's just surreal. The whole thing is surreal," she said.

Breaking the news to her children was a moment Lahra wished she could do-over.

"I walk in and they went, 'Mum, how is he?' And I said, 'He's gone.' One of my children became hysterical, screaming at me that I promised he would be fine. One just mutely sat crying. One started wailing. I didn't do whatever I should have done properly."

Now young adults, her children admitted that because they hadn't seen their father, his death never became real to them.

"They had this joke between themselves, this black joke, that he was in witness protection because they had never actually seen that he wasn't alive," Lahra said.

"One of my daughters, in every dream she had about him, he would be hiding in her bathroom saying, 'You can't tell anyone I'm here.' I think it was quite traumatic for them for their lives not to have actually seen him and gone through that moment that I had, which was horrific but I knew."

Lahra shares her story on tonight's episode of SBS Insight. Image: SBS.

Lahra faced an unimaginable struggle of trying to manage her children's grief and her own while balancing practical challenges she hadn't anticipated.

"I realised he was really responsible for the finances. I had no idea how much we had left to pay on the renovation. I didn't know his passwords. We had a will that wasn't signed," she said.

"When someone dies unexpectedly, and you have a joint account, the account's frozen, so I didn't have access to money."

Lahra felt it was up to her to make everything okay for everybody else. But inside, she was crumbling.

"I really didn't want to be alive anymore. I didn't want to kill myself, but I just didn't want to be alive," Lahra admitted. "I described it at the time as feeling like I'd fallen into some black hole in the centre of the earth and I had no idea how to get out and there was no light."

Throughout this darkness, well-meaning friends and family kept telling her how strong she was.

"You feel like you want to scream. I didn't feel strong at all," she said. "I kept thinking, 'I don't want to do this.' I reverted internally to some kind of spoiled child. And there was nobody going to tell me, 'it's okay, I'm here.' He was the only one who would have done that."

It was her children who ultimately helped pull her from the depths of grief.

"They independently decided they were going to remember their father with laughter and love and stories. They didn't want to focus on what they'd lost. They wanted to look at what they had," Lahra said.

"One of them said to me, 'We lost our father, but now we feel like we're losing you.' At the end of the first year, I promised them I was going to find a way to be happy again."

Lahra and Ben on their wedding day. Image: SBS.

Support from other widows proved invaluable, particularly Ben's best friend's widow, who had lost both her husband and four-year-old child a decade earlier.

When Lahra asked her, "Am I ever going to feel like me again?" the response was profound.

"No, not the you that you were," her friend told her. "But it's like if you'd lost a limb or some part of your body stopped working – other parts become stronger."

Her friend also shared the concept of "tending the garden of grief" — recognising the different aspects of loss and mourning various parts of the relationship.

Eight years later, Lahra has a new perspective on grief.

"When you start working out in the gym, the weights don't become lighter — you become stronger, so they feel lighter. That's how it is with grief. It doesn't become lighter, but you just get used to it," she said.

"I have a very different relationship with that grief now. I'm no longer struggling under the weight of it. I've made my way out of that dark tunnel and I'm definitely walking on top of the earth again — this is just with me now."

Watch Lahra's story on SBS Insight: Navigating Widowhood on SBS On Demand.

Feature image: SBS.