“The grief felt like a void, like it was sucking me in and pushing on me, pulling me in and I couldn’t even see or breathe. People who have been through this told me it gets better. And I didn’t really believe them. I want other people who go through things to believe it does get better.”
That’s how Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg described the sudden loss of her beloved husband, Dave Goldberg, in 2015 in a recent Associated Press interview with Barbara Ortitay.
Sandberg shares the lasting lessons from this devastating experience in her new book, “Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience and Finding Joy,” co-written with psychologist Adam Grant.
“Tragedy does not have to be personal, pervasive or permanent, but resilience can be, ” she says. “We can build it and carry it around with us throughout our lives.”
But coming to that realization was not an easy one for this mother of two young children, who wondered if she would ever feel joy again. As she told CBS This Morning’s, Nora O’Donnell:
“In some ways we are all living option B. No one’s life is perfect. And the question is, when things go wrong. then what?”
“And I learned so much from Dave’s death. Things I wish so much that I could go back and share with him. But I don’t have that option. But I do have the option to live every day with the joy I would have had, had I known Dave and I had so few years. And I do have the option of helping other people learn those lessons, if possible. That’s what I’m hoping ‘Option B’ does.”
For more information, check out Sheryl’s non-profit optionb.org
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