Sheryl Sandberg, author of the bestseller Lean In, has written a personal and touching Facebook post about grief and loss a month after her husband Dave Goldberg passed away unexpectedly. Sandberg wrote the post to mark the end of sheloshim, the first thirty days of mourning in Judaism.
In the piece, the Facebook COO talks about her response to this tragedy and reveals that she has gained a “profound understanding of what it is to be a mother both through the depth of the agony I feel when my children scream and cry and from the connection my mother has to my pain.” She also expresses her immense gratitude for the people in her life. Here is an excerpt:
I have learned that I never really knew what to say to others in need. I think I got this all wrong before; I tried to assure people that it would be okay, thinking that hope was the most comforting thing I could offer. A friend of mine with late-stage cancer told me that the worst thing people could say to him was “It is going to be okay.” That voice in his head would scream, How do you know it is going to be okay? Do you not understand that I might die? I learned this past month what he was trying to teach me. Real empathy is sometimes not insisting that it will be okay but acknowledging that it is not.