GOOD GRIEF
In her new book, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy, Sheryl Sandberg talks about becoming a widow at 45, facing a future she’d never imagined and ‘leaning into the suck’.
Widowed Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg on adopting a new approach to bereavement
The name ‘Sheryl Sandberg’ might not immediately ring a bell, but her job title will: she is the COO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg’s right-hand woman. (He poached her from Google back in 2007.) In 2012, she was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World by Time magazine. And she’s been named one of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Business by Fortune magazine, moving steadily up the rankings from number 29 in 2007 to number six last year. Sheryl is also part of a small, elite group of women, rare as unicorns: the female billionaires.
But beyond that, she’s a feminist icon in a very male industry, and a fierce advocate for women finding their way in the workplace. In her 2013 book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, she wrote: ‘A truly equal world would be one where women ran half our countries and companies and men ran half our homes.’ In the book, Sheryl commended her husband, Dave, for his commitment to sharing childcare equally; it was because he was a hands-on dad to their two kids that she could put in the hours at work. In fact, an entire chapter in the book is dedicated to the topic of choosing the right partner, someone willing to share the workload at home. ‘The most important career choice you’ll make is who you marry,’ she said in a 2011 speech.
Her new book, out this year, is more personal and centres on an event that changed her life. In 2015, while on holiday in Mexico, Dave suddenly passed away from cardiac arrhythmia (caused by coronary artery disease). She found him lying on the floor next to the elliptical machine in the hotel gym, a small pool of blood under his head. He was just 47. ‘Dave was my rock,’ she writes. ‘When I got upset, he stayed calm. When I was worried, he said that everything would be okay. When I wasn’t sure what to do, he helped me figure it out. Like all married couples, we had our ups and downs. Still, Dave gave me the experience of being deeply understood, supported and utterly loved. I thought I’d spend the rest of my life resting my head on his shoulder.’
At just 45, Sheryl was widowed; her children were just seven and 10. ‘And so began the rest of my life,’ she writes. ‘It was, and still is, a life I never would have chosen, a life I was completely unprepared for. The unimaginable. Sitting down with my son and daughter and telling them their father had died. Hearing their screams, joined by my own. The funeral. Speeches where people spoke of Dave in the past tense. My house filling up with familiar faces coming up to me again and again, delivering the perfunctory kiss on the cheek, followed by those same words: “I’m sorry for your loss.”’
Grief, says Sheryl, is a demanding companion. But it’s also inspired her to write about some of her experiences and how she’s learnt to work through the grief. ‘Resilience is the strength and speed of our response to adversity – and we can build it,’ she writes. With the help of her friend and co-author Adam Grant, a psychologist and professor at Wharton business school, Sheryl started looking at what
‘And so began the rest of my life. It was, and still is, a life I never would have chosen, a life I was completely unprepared for. The unimaginable.’
‘Option B’ might look like – the life that wasn’t her first choice but her new reality. ‘I learnt that when life pulls you under, you can kick against the bottom, break the surface and breathe again.’
The 3 P’s
According to decades of research by psychologist Martin Seligman, there are three things that can delay recovery, which he refers to as the 3 P’s:
1. Personalisation: the notion that you’re somehow to blame.
2. Pervasiveness: the notion that your life will be irrevocably altered.
3. Permanence: the notion that the aftermath of the event will last forever.
Sheryl sums them up respectively as: ‘It’s my fault this is awful. My whole life is awful. And it’s always going to be awful.’
First off, there was personalisation. Sheryl spent weeks blaming herself for what she should have done differently. She should have found Dave sooner. (Not true: he died instantly.) His coronary artery disease had never been diagnosed; she’d missed the signs. (Also not her fault: Dave had never shown obvious symptoms.) Sheryl also blamed herself for the disruption Dave’s death had caused – how it had affected and inconvenienced her friends, family and colleagues. ‘I apologised constantly to everyone,’ she writes. ‘To my mom, who put her life on hold to stay with me for the first month. To my friends who dropped everything to travel to the funeral. To my clients for missing appointments. To my colleagues for losing focus when emotion overwhelmed me.’ But Adam set her a simple task to help her let go of the idea that she was to blame: to banish the word ‘sorry’ from her vocabulary.
Then there was pervasiveness. Sheryl believes a supportive working environment can make all the difference. The kids returned to their daily routines, and even though the first few days back at work were a haze, Sheryl soon found that she was able to ‘forget’ her grief for long stretches in the day.
Of the three P’s, she found the idea of permanence the hardest – how the anguish of losing her husband would stretch over decades, and how it would affect her children to grow up without a father. Sheryl’s fear was that the children would never be happy again. In fact, the first person she called from the hospital was her childhood friend Mindy. ‘I screamed into the phone hysterically, “Tell me my kids are going to be okay!”’ she wrote. Mindy’s mom had committed suicide when she was 13, and to Sheryl, Mindy was living proof that you could lose a parent and still become a happy adult.
Research shows that we routinely overestimate how long we’ll be affected by negative experiences. ‘Just as the body has a physiological immune system, the brain has a psychological immune system,’ writes Sheryl. ‘When something goes wrong, we instinctively marshal defence mechanisms. We see silver linings in clouds. We add sugar and water to lemons.’
To help banish the idea of permanence, Sheryl learnt to stop thinking in terms of ‘never’ and ‘always’. ‘Just as I had to banish “sorry” from my vocabulary, I tried to eliminate “never” and “always” and replace them with “sometimes” and “lately”. “I’ll always feel this awful” became “I’ll sometimes feel this awful”. Not the most cheerful thought, but still an improvement.’
Leaning into the suck
Rabbi Nat Ezray, who led Dave’s funeral, gave her another piece of memorable advice: to ‘lean into the suck’, to ‘expect it to be awful’. ‘Not exactly what I meant when I said “lean in” [in her 2013 book],’ she writes. ‘But for me it was good advice.’ Leaning into the suck was about admitting that you are not in control, and making allowances for the moments when it all got to be too much. Sheryl and her kids came up with a mantra: ‘respect your feelings’. That meant taking a cry break if they needed to. The kids’ teachers arranged for them to go outside with a friend when they were feeling overwhelmed at school.
Sheryl had to follow her own advice as well. ‘Leaning into the suck meant admitting I could not control when the sadness would come over me. I needed cry breaks too.’ And she took them, at her desk, at the side of the road in her car – whenever, wherever. ‘When I stopped fighting those moments, they passed more quickly.’
She also learnt the value of not always looking on the bright side. ‘My instinct was to try to find positive thoughts. But Adam told me it was a good idea to think about how much worse things could be. “How could this be worse?” I asked him. His answer cut through me: “Dave could have had that cardiac arrhythmia driving your children.” Wow. The thought that I could have lost all three of them had never occurred to me.’
The elephant in the room
There was one particular aspect of becoming a widow that Sheryl did not anticipate or know how to deal with.
‘Leaning into the suck meant admitting that I could not control when the sadness would come over me. I needed cry breaks too.’
She was mystified when people didn’t mention the fact that her husband had recently died, or ask how she was. ‘When someone shows up with a cast, we enquire, “What happened?” If your life is shattered, people don’t.’
After a while, she realised it wasn’t indifference, but caution. People were afraid to bring up a topic that could dredge up trauma, or were often not sure how to. As a society, we’re taught to conceal negative emotions. Author Anna Quindlen writes: ‘More than sex, more than faith, even more than its usher, death, grief is unspoken, publicly ignored, except for those moments at the funeral that are over too quickly.’
After being diagnosed with lymphoma, writer Emily McDowell found that the worst part ‘was the loneliness and isolation I felt when many of my close friends and family members disappeared because they didn’t know what to say, or said the absolute wrong thing without realising it’. So Emily created what she called brutally honest ‘empathy cards’, with messages like: ‘When life gives you lemons, I won’t tell you a story about my cousin’s friend who died of lemons,’ or ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch. I didn’t know what to say.’
Sheryl confronted the problem in a way that was rather appropriate, considering her job. She posted about it on Facebook – about how indescribable her grief was, about how she longed to choose meaning over emptiness, and about how friends and family had helped her. She also addressed how the ‘avoidance’ made her feel. Sheryl says it hurt when people asked ‘How are you?’ ‘Because it didn’t acknowledge that anything out of the ordinary had happened.’ She suggested an alternative question: ‘How are you today?’ This, she says, ‘showed that they were aware that I was struggling to get through each day’.
The Platinum Rule
When someone is going through a difficult time, your instinct is to reach out. But then anxiety kicks in: ‘what if I say the wrong thing?’ Sheryl has some simple advice. ‘There’s no one way to grieve and there’s no one way to comfort,’ she writes. ‘Growing up, I was taught to follow the Golden Rule: treat others as you want to be treated. But when someone is suffering, we need to follow the Platinum Rule: treat others as they want to be treated. Take a cue from the person in distress and respond with understanding – or better yet, action.’
As Sheryl was struggling to adapt to her new normal, friends and family would ask, ‘Is there anything I can do?’ and often she’d be at a loss for what to suggest or afraid of inconveniencing them. Author Bruce Feiler recommends that friends and family take the initiative instead of making a vague offer. ‘While well-meaning,’ he writes, [the offer to do anything] ‘unintentionally shifts the obligation to the aggrieved. Instead of offering “anything”, just do something.’
Bruce’s examples? Packing supplies sent to a friend who was in the process of moving after going through a divorce, and a ‘fire shower’ organised for someone who lost their home and was in desperate need. When the son of Sheryl’s friend Dan was in hospital, a friend texted him: ‘What do you NOT want on a burger?’, a gesture he appreciated. ‘Instead of asking if I wanted food, he made the choice for me but gave me the dignity of feeling in control,’ Dan says. ‘Specific acts help because instead of trying to fix the problem, they address the damage caused by the problem,’ writes Sheryl.
Dear Diary
Since childhood, Sheryl had tried and failed to keep a journal, starting one every few years and inevitably giving up a few days later. But when tragedy struck, it became a key part of her recovery process. ‘Over the five months following Dave’s funeral, 106 338 words poured out of me,’ she writes. ‘Journalling helped me process my overwhelming feelings and my all-toomany regrets.’
Adam then suggested she also list three accomplishments per day. ‘I was barely functioning,’ says Sheryl. ‘What moments of success could I find? Got dressed today. Trophy please!’
But research suggests that celebrating ‘small wins’ can be beneficial, even more so than the tried-and-tested happiness-boosting gratitude journal. Adam and his colleague Jane Dutton discovered that ‘counting our blessings doesn’t boost our confidence, but counting our contributions can’. The reasoning? Gratitude is passive, while contributions are active. ‘They build our confidence by reminding us that we can make a difference.’
Taking back joy
Sheryl realised that she and her kids had been hanging on to their grief out of guilt. ‘Survivor guilt is a thief of joy – yet another secondary loss from death. When people lose a loved one, they aren’t just racked with grief but also with remorse. It’s another personalisation trap: “Why am I the one who is still alive?” Even after acute grief is gone, the guilt remains: “I didn’t spend enough time with him.”’
She and her kids were purposefully avoiding her husband’s favourite places and activities because it brought up memories of him. But Sheryl didn’t want their memories of him to fade, so she implemented another family mantra: ‘We take it back.’
‘Rather than give up the things that reminded us of Dave, we made them an ongoing part of our lives.’ Sheryl and her kids started playing Settlers of Catan again, a board game they’d enjoyed as a family, and Sheryl took back Game of Thrones, which she and Dave had watched together.
She also started looking for small ways to move forward. She taught her kids to play hearts, a card game from her childhood; they started biking on weekends – something Dave had been unable to do due to his bad back; and Sheryl took up the piano, which she hadn’t played in years. These new activities brought new interest, joy and strength into their lives. ‘We want others to be happy. Allowing ourselves to be happy – accepting that it’s okay to push through the guilt and seek joy is a triumph over permanence. Having fun is a form of self-compassion.’
Read more about Sheryl’s journey in her book Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience and Finding Joy.