As Facebook’s chief operating officer, she is one of the most powerful women in the world. How did she cope with the sudden death of her husband?

Sheryl Sandberg’s last words to her husband, like all last words, assumed a haunting poignancy. “I’m falling asleep,” she told him, oblivious to the imminence of tragedy, and curled up on a cushion for a nap.

It was Friday 1 May 2015. She and Dave Goldberg, 47, had left their two children at home with her parents in northern California and flown down to Mexico for a weekend break to celebrate a friend’s 50th birthday. They were Silicon Valley royalty’s power couple; he the CEO of a tech company worth more than $1bn, she the chief operating officer of Facebook and author of global bestseller Lean In, a feminist call to arms for working women to emulate the self-belief and ambition of men. Sandberg had featured on Forbes’ list of the most powerful women on the planet, served as chief of staff to the Treasury secretary in Bill Clinton’s government, been widely tipped as a future member of a Hillary Clinton cabinet and earned a personal fortune well in excess of $1bn. At 45 she was mother to a 10-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter; weekends away were rare and precious. No wonder she was tired. She fell asleep that afternoon a happily married wife, and woke up an hour later a widow.

When Sandberg didn’t see her husband, she at first thought nothing of it and joined her friends for a swim. She took a shower, spoke to their son on the phone and dressed for dinner. It was only when she rejoined the group on the beach and realised no one had seen Goldberg for hours that panic set in. Racing to the resort gym, she found him lying on his back, his face blue, a pool of blood around his head. She performed frantic CPR, an ambulance rushed him to hospital, but it was too late. He had suffered a fatal heart attack. Sandberg flew home that evening to tell her children their father had died.

The news of Sandberg’s loss made global headlines, but held a particular resonance for my family. I knew what it was to fly away a happy couple and come home with a coffin, for our own beach holiday had shattered into tragedy 12 months earlier when my partner had drowned. As a member of what Sandberg calls “this club of ours no one ever wants to join”, I wasn’t surprised that she went back to work 10 days later – when every room in your house is haunted by memories, the longing for refuge is overwhelming. Nor was I surprised by the problem she was floored to find waiting for her at the office.

“You know, we were Facebook. We were very open. We sit at open desks and we share openly,” she tells me as we talk at Facebook HQ in Menlo Park, in northern California. Sandberg doesn’t even have her own office at work, but sits among her colleagues in a vast open-plan space. “It’s part of who we are. We share. But everyone looked at me like I was a ghost. No one would talk to me.” She confided in her boss, Mark Zuckerberg: “All my relationships are gone, and no one will talk to me.” He told her, “They want to. They just don’t know what to say.”

In Jewish tradition, the mourning period for a spouse lasts for 30 days. As it drew to a close, Sandberg took a risk so out of character that even now she seems faintly amazed by herself. She wrote an unfiltered account of her grief-stricken month, and posted it publicly on Facebook.

“The night before, I thought, this is a terrible idea. This is too personal, too raw, there’s no way I’m posting this.” But when she woke the next morning, “I was like, this is supposed to be the end of mourning? I could not feel less like the end of mourning, this is horrible. And I said, you know, it’s not going to get worse, and I just hit post. And it broke open the dam.”

Sandberg’s post has attracted more than 74,000 comments to date. Strangers all over the world flooded her Facebook page with tales of their own tragedies and heartbreaks. “And you know,” she says, “after that, I didn’t feel alone any more.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest With husband Dave Goldberg in 2011, four years before his sudden death. Photograph: Julie Jacobson/AP

If something as simple as sharing stories could have such a radical impact on her grief, Sandberg wondered what else might. Why is it that some people never recover from loss, while others emerge with greater resilience to lead more meaningful lives? Working with a psychologist, Adam Grant, Sandberg studied the research of behavioural scientists, neurologists and psychologists for techniques empirically proven to build resilience. To her amazement, she discovered that by applying them all, she wouldn’t just recover but could actually achieve “post-traumatic growth”.

Option B, Sandberg and Grant’s book, is part personal memoir and part practical manual for how to withstand catastrophe and grow from adversity. She even claims it can deliver “pre-traumatic growth” for readers yet to suffer loss themselves, who fortify themselves with the lessons she has learned. Had I not yet read the book, this might sound to me like the laughable nonsense of California self-help. But Option B (named after the idea that if your Option A is taken away, you have to “kick the shit out of Option B”) is the single wisest book about grief I have ever found, and so useful that I only wish it had been in print three years ago. When I was widowed I would have stuck pages to my fridge, and sent it to relatives who wanted to help but didn’t know how, so cleared off rather than get it wrong. All we’d needed was a book spelling out how to help, when I was too broken to explain. I have tried to think of anyone who would not find Option B invaluable at some point in their life, and I can’t.

***

Facebook HQ lies 25 miles south of San Francisco, on a forgettable stretch of industrial estate flanked by a freeway. Whoever designed it went to some lengths to perfect an aggressively glamour-free aesthetic. The grey metal building is a quarter of a mile long, stands on top of a nine-acre car park and is accessed by squat silver buildings which look uncannily like the entrance lobbies found in Ikea car parks. The resemblance to Ikea does not end there. Each lobby is furnished by a reception that appears to have been knocked together in a hurry out of makeshift plywood, but on closer inspection turns out to be permanent. Stairs lead up to the first floor, where open-plan office space stretches as far as the eye can see and accommodates 2,500 staff. The interior looks half-finished – concrete floors, no ceiling to conceal the industrial tangle of electrical cables and ventilation flues overhead – but Facebook moved in two years ago, so this must be how it’s meant to look. Rows of identical white desks are punctuated by columns identified by numbers, like an Ikea warehouse, presumably to help staff find their way back. Facebook calls its HQ a campus, and it’s easy to see why, as I don’t spot anyone over 30 and everybody is dressed like an undergraduate. Sandberg’s desk is somewhere near the middle and looks like everyone else’s; we will meet in a big glass box, one of two meeting rooms and the only enclosed spaces I see.

I was not shocked by the anger, not shocked by the sadness. But the self-confidence blow completely surprised me

But no amount of gratuitous architectural austerity can distract from the power and wealth of this organisation, for most of which its COO is almost single-handedly responsible. Sandberg joined from Google in 2008 and turned Facebook from a popular tech startup that didn’t make money into one of the wealthiest companies on the planet. She comes to meet me straight after the photoshoot, looking like an Italian screen siren, all tiny birdlike limbs and big luxurious hair, and is shockingly beautiful. To my surprise she throws her arms around me and showers me in flattery. “I’m so glad you’re doing this interview,” she tells me, fixing a luminescent gaze. “Because you get it.”

In the early months after Goldberg’s death, Sandberg says she made the three classic mistakes – “the three ps – personalisation, pervasiveness and permanence”. She blamed herself for his death: “Especially because the early reports, which were false, said he died by falling off an exercise machine. So I absolutely thought that if I had looked for him sooner, he would be alive. A friend would say to me, ‘You didn’t leave a three-year-old alone in a gym.’ But I felt hugely guilty.” When the autopsy revealed undiagnosed coronary artery disease, “I spent months thinking I should have known that. I felt hugely guilty; you blame yourself endlessly. Then one day Adam [Grant] said, ‘If you do not recover, your kids cannot recover. That is it. You must.’ So that really snapped me out of it. I was like, OK, this isn’t my fault. I stopped taking it personally.

“Then the pervasiveness. You don’t want to feel that anything’s good, as in, ‘Can I feel OK about work? How can I feel OK?’ Right, and then the permanence, and that for me was the hardest. It felt in the depths of grief that I would always feel sad. It would always feel that bad. And the sadness is still here, I still miss him every day, but it does not feel like it did in the beginning, when you can’t breathe. That’s why I shared so openly about the pain and the grief, because I think the only way people are going to think it gets better is if they know you feel what they were feeling.”

Sandberg writes about the moment she had to break the news to her children of their father’s death; “The screaming and crying that followed haunt me to this day. Nothing has come close to the pain of this moment. Even now when my mind wanders back, I shake and my throat constricts.” She studied research on how to raise resilient children, asked friends to make videos of themselves talking about their memories of Goldberg, filmed the children sharing their own memories of their father and played one of those films back to her daughter when she worried she was “forgetting Daddy because she has not seen him for so long”. On what would have been his 48th birthday, they wrote letters to him and sent them up in balloons.

She learned actively to seek out and treasure small moments of joy, and made it a habit to write down a list of three moments at the end of every day. “Writing about joyful experiences for just three days can improve people’s moods and decrease their visits to health centres a full three months later,” she reports in Option B – and having taken her advice and tried it, I can confirm it works. I almost winced with self-consciousness making my first entry – “Dancing with my son in a children’s nightclub” – but it makes me smile every time I read it. Another device she learned works, too: to make a list each night of three things she’d done well that day. In the early days hers were as modest as: Made tea. Got through all of my emails. Went to work and focused for most of one meeting. “But it really does work,” she says, “and everyone I know who’s tried it since then has told me it works. It absolutely works.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest With Mark Zuckerberg. Photograph: Andrew Gombert/EPA

She could never have guessed that rebuilding self-confidence would play such a big part in recovering from grief. “Well, that part was so interesting for me, right, because I’d thought a lot about self-confidence. I wrote an entire book on self-confidence. The Lean In community helps people get together to build self-confidence. Now, I had read about grief and I was not shocked by the anger, not shocked by the sadness. But the self-confidence blow completely surprised me.”

Confidence was not a commodity Sandberg had ever been short of before. Now she felt like a failure, both at work and at home. “I felt I could barely get through a meeting without thinking about Dave. And parenting is hard in the first place, but I had a partner and I had two kids with very happy childhoods. Then all of a sudden I had two grieving children and no partner and no experience. So my self-confidence completely crumbled.” What Sandberg needed, for the first time in her life, was praise.

When she made mistakes in the early weeks back at work, her colleagues would brush them off with, “How could you keep things straight with all you’re going through?” It was exactly what she had said herself in the past to anyone struggling with personal problems. Now she saw that, far from making her feel better, it only damaged her self-confidence further. She found out what actually helped when she panicked to Zuckerberg about something she’d got wrong, and he responded, “Really? I thought you made a good point in that meeting and helped us make a better decision.” Empathy, she writes, “was nice but encouragement was better”.

Another mistake she’d made before Goldberg died was to ask people in trouble, “Is there anything I can do?” She says, “I really meant it. But it kind of shifts the burden to the person who needs the help to tell you.” The classic inquiry, “How are you?” also turned out to be unhelpful. “Well, my husband just died on the floor of a gym. Like, how am I?” The more meaningful question, she learned, is “How are you today?”

Mark is why I’m walking. When I felt so isolated and just needed to cry, I would drag him into his conference room

But the biggest – and remarkably common – mistake is to ask nothing at all. “I want to talk about Dave. Bringing up Dave to me is always a positive. It doesn’t make me sad. I know he’s gone.” I ask if anyone has said they didn’t like to mention him as they didn’t want to “remind” her of her loss, and she laughs. “Yes. It’s not possible to remind me.” She recommends something she calls the platinum rule of friendship, “not to treat people as you want to be treated, but treat people as they want to be treated. That’s a pretty big mind shift, and some people do that quite naturally and some people don’t.”

To anyone who saw The Social Network, the film about Facebook’s origins which portrayed Zuckerberg as a socially awkward computer geek, this may come as a surprise, but the emotionally astute stand-out star of Option B is Sandberg’s boss. “Mark is why I’m walking. Most of what [he and his wife Priscilla] did is not even in the book, because they did so much. When I felt so overwhelmed and so isolated and just needed to cry, I would drag him into his conference room and he would just sit there with me and be like, ‘We’re going to get through this and we want to get through it with you.’ He did it over and over.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest With Mike Pence and Donald Trump in December last year. Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Sandberg says she likes the person loss has taught her to become, and prefers this new self to her old one. “I would definitely choose to be before, so I could get Dave back. I’d give up all the growth. But the deeper sense of meaning, gratitude, purpose – those things are wonderful things. My kids have unbelievable perspective. My son, they lost the basketball play-offs two weeks ago and all the other kids are pretty upset and my son looks at me and goes, ‘Mum, we’ve been through horrible things. This is sixth grade basketball. I’m good.’ He just had a birthday party because he’s going to turn 12. And the joy I feel in that, I never felt before. Before I thought it was obvious he would turn 12. Who doesn’t turn 12? But now I do not take that for granted. And that does, with all the pain, give your life much deeper meaning.”

I get the impression, though, that she is angrier than she cares to say. She writes about having struggled with anger, and when I ask how she managed her feelings towards loved ones she felt let her down, I’m struck by how she sidesteps the question. “I don’t know anyone who’s been through this who hasn’t had friends who disappointed them. I think we all go through that.” Has she lost friends? She looks uneasy. “There are people who I was close to and am now not as close to. Very few, but there’s a few.”

Ten months after being widowed, Sandberg began dating Bobby Kotick, an old friend and tech billionaire. A Facebook user posted that she was a “garbage whore”; another that she was “one classy lady” for “already sharing fluids with a new guy”. I ask how she feels about being judged, and glimpse a rare flash of uncamouflaged anger.

“I’m hoping that this book helps people stop judging people who date [after the loss of a partner], particularly women, because women get judged much more harshly. Men date sooner, men date more, and women get judged more. And, you know, obviously that’s super unfair. I think I’m helping people remember that dating, for those who want to do it, is part of moving forward, and it is option B. If I could I would only date Dave. I made that choice. I just had that taken away from me.” I ask if her children have accepted her new partner and she says, “Yes yes,” but something in her expression closes the subject down.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest With old friend and new boyfriend Bobby Kotick last July. Photograph: Getty Images

Sandberg was not born into the executive super-rich. She grew up in Miami, comfortably middle class, the eldest of three children to an ophthalmologist father and a mother who taught French. A straight A student, she studied economics at Harvard before being hired by her thesis tutor, Larry Summers, to be his assistant at the World Bank. She returned to Harvard a year later, studied an MBA, graduated with distinction and was hired by the management consultants McKinsey before going to work for Summers in the White House. Her sole biographical failure, as she saw it, was a marriage at 24 to a Washington businessman which ended in divorce a year later.

She is without a doubt one of the most impressive women I’ve ever met. And yet there is something disconcerting about our conversation; a sense that we are impersonating intimacy. Beneath the surface something feels tightly controlled, strategically calculated. As our hour together comes to a close, I sense her attention starting to wander. The early intensity has gone; the luminescence is fading. She glances at the clock. I try to ask about Facebook but she stops me; we are to talk about the book, nothing else, and the shutters slam down. A few minutes later we hug goodbye, but before I leave, I’m taken aback when she asks, “So, what did I get wrong?”

What does she mean? “The book. Tell me what I got wrong.” I remember that Sandberg is famous for inviting feedback, so I tell her I wish she’d put more of herself into the book. She looks appalled. “No! Really?” Her editors, she groans, already extracted more from her than she meant to divulge; there is nothing left, she says, to tell.

But listening back to the interview tape afterwards, I’m struck by the deftness with which she evades inquiries that trespass from the path of the story she wants to tell. For example, she takes conspicuous care throughout Option B to acknowledge the wealth that protects her from difficulties most widows face. I ask if she did this because critics of Lean In accused her of appearing oblivious to the privileges that make her life unrecognisable to most women, but before I can finish the question she replies with statistics about single mothers’ poverty levels. When I ask if she’s concerned that the resentful register of contemporary identity politics will make it hard for some readers to find sympathy for a billionaire widow, she closes the question down with, “I think everyone deserves sympathy” and starts talking about a prison visit she made, and how prisoners deserve it, too, which is a different question altogether, and one she is far too clever to have confused with mine.

I leave in awe of Sandberg’s resolve to find a positive story to tell out of tragedy. But I also leave feeling unsettled by how carefully curated the whole encounter seemed. It takes days to place the feeling, and when I do it is perfectly obvious. It’s exactly the feeling I get when I look at profiles on Facebook. Perhaps that’s no surprise: Sandberg is a natural leader and problem solver – not merely Facebook’s COO but its living embodiment – who has dealt with her grief almost as if it were a failing business to be turned around; she studied the data, applied herself to its findings, and found the potential for growth.

‘He led me to the dancefloor and we let go, dancing and singing. Then I burst into tears’



An exclusive extract from Sheryl Sandberg’s new book

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sandberg (far right) with ‘the Girls’; ‘friends for life’ since school.

When I was 11, my best friend informed me that I wasn’t cool enough to hang out with. This hurtful breakup turned out to be a blessing. Soon after I was dumped, three girls picked me up. We became friends for life, adding three more to our circle in high school. Mindy, Eve, Jami, Elise, Pam and Beth – or, as we still call each other, “the Girls”.

In the fall of 2015, Beth’s daughter was becoming a batmitzvah. Part of me didn’t want to go. Just days before my husband Dave died, we had picked a date for our son’s barmitzvah. The thought that Dave would not be at our own son’s ceremonial transition to adulthood cast a pall over the occasion. But during the dark days of that summer, the Girls had checked in daily. They took turns coming to California. By showing up again and again, they proved to me that I was not alone. I wanted to be there for them in the happy times, just as they’d been there for me in the sad.

Sitting with the Girls and their families at the service felt deeply comforting, almost as if I had been transported back to when we were teenagers. The ceremony ended with the traditional reciting of the prayer for those who have died. Six hands reached out to me. My friends held me tightly and we got through it together.

At the party that night, there were other guests from our Miami schooldays, including the cutest boy in our class: Brook Rose. Back then, none of us believed we had a chance with him, and after college he confirmed that when he told us he’s gay.

The DJ started playing September by Earth, Wind & Fire and Brook reached for my hand. He led me to the dancefloor and, just like high school, we let go, dancing and singing. Then I burst into tears.

Brook quickly manoeuvred me to the outdoor patio and asked what was wrong. I assumed I was missing Dave, except I knew exactly what that felt like and somehow this was different. Then it dawned on me: dancing to a song from childhood had taken me to a place where I wasn’t filled with loneliness and longing. I actually felt happy. And that happiness was followed immediately by a flood of guilt. How could I be happy when Dave was gone?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sandberg (with glasses) with ‘the Girls’.

The next day, I told my friend Adam Grant, a psychologist, about my meltdown on the dancefloor. He wasn’t surprised. “Of course this was the first moment you were happy,” he told me. “You haven’t been doing a single thing that brings you joy.”

For more than four months since Dave died, I’d been completely focused on my kids, my job and just making it through each day. I had stopped doing anything Dave and I had done together for fun, such as going to movies, having dinner with friends, watching Game Of Thrones, or playing Settlers Of Catan or Scrabble. Catan was especially upsetting to me because Dave and I had been playing during our last moments while on holiday in Mexico to celebrate a friend’s birthday. There were plenty of reasons to hole up. I didn’t want to leave my kids with a babysitter. I was afraid that if I tried to go out, I’d end up crying in public. I had made one attempt to be social early that autumn. I invited friends over to watch a movie. We started the evening with frozen yoghurt and I kept thinking, you can do this. Pretend everything’s normal. A few minutes into the movie, the main character’s wife died. I thought the froyo was going to come back up. Everything was not normal.

In my Facebook post 30 days into widowhood, I wrote that I’d never have another moment of pure joy. When friends who had lost spouses assured me that some day I would feel happy again, I didn’t believe them. Then Earth, Wind & Fire proved me wrong. But the moment of happiness was fleeting, barely rearing its head before guilt whacked it back into its hole.

Survivor guilt is a thief of joy. When people lose a loved one, they are not just racked with grief, but also with remorse. “I could have saved her.” “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.”

Until that moment on the dancefloor, I did not realise I’d been holding myself back from happiness. Even that fleeting moment was ruined by guilt, making my prediction that I’d never feel pure joy again seem accurate. Then, one day, Dave’s brother Rob gave me a true gift. “Since the day Dave met you, all he ever wanted was to make you happy,” Rob told me, his voice choking up. “He would want you to be happy – even now. Don’t take that away from him.” My sister-in-law Amy helped, too, by making me see how much my mood affected my children. They had told her they were feeling better because “Mommy stopped crying all the time”.

With Rob’s and Amy’s words ringing in my ears, I decided to try having fun for my children – and with my children. Dave had loved playing Catan with our kids. One afternoon, I asked them if they wanted to play. They did. In the past, I was always orange. My daughter was blue. My son was red. Dave was grey. When just the three of us sat down to play, my daughter pulled out the grey pieces. My son got upset and tried to take them away from her, insisting, “That was Daddy’s colour. You can’t be grey!” I held his hand and said, “She can be grey. We take things back.”

“We take it back” became our mantra – rather than give up the things that reminded us of Dave, we embraced them. We took back rooting for the teams that Dave loved. We took back poker, which Dave had played with our kids since they were young.

For myself, I took back Game Of Thrones. It wasn’t nearly as much fun as watching with Dave, who had read the entire series of books and could track who was plotting against whom. But I caught up, and ended the season rooting for Khaleesi and her dragons. I started having friends over to watch movies, looking more carefully for ones in which no one loses a spouse. My best take-back was finding the perfect online Scrabble opponent. Dave and I had played together. Dave and Rob had played together. Now Rob and I play each other. In almost 100 games, I have beaten Rob a grand total of once. But now, for just a few minutes on our phones throughout the day, Rob and I are connected to each other… and to Dave.

Whether you see joy as a discipline, an act of defiance, a luxury or a necessity, it is something everyone deserves. Even when we’re in great distress, joy can still be found. Cooking. Dancing. Hiking. Praying. Driving. Singing Billy Joel songs off-key. And when these moments add up, we find that they give us more than happiness; they also give us strength.

• This is an edited and condensed extract from Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, And Finding Joy, by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant, published on 24 April by WH Allen at £16.99. To order a copy for £12.74, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.