For the first time in a public setting, Sheryl Sandberg has described her grief following the death of her husband last year.
In a commencement speech at U.C. Berkeley on May 14, the chief operating officer of Facebook said she was “swallowed up in the deep fog of grief — what I think of as the void — an emptiness that fills your heart, your lungs, constricts your ability to think or even to breathe.’’
Sandberg’s husband, Dave Goldberg, died unexpectedly in May 2015 after sustaining a head trauma when he fell off a treadmill while vacationing with his family in Mexico. The CEO of Palo Alto-based SurveyMonkey was 47.
Sandberg, 46, told the graduating class in Berkeley, “I learned about the depths of sadness and the brutality of loss. But I also learned that when life sucks you under, you can kick against the bottom, find the surface and breathe again.”
The couple was married for 11 years with two children. In a moving Facebook post (www.tinyurl.com/sandberg-essay), Sandberg wrote last June about marking the end of the shloshim, the 30-day period after a loved one’s death. In past speeches, she has called Jewish summer camp and BBYO important in helping her stay close to her Jewish identity.
In her address last week, Sandberg told some 4,700 graduating seniors and another 20,000-plus friends and family members, “The greatest irony of my life [is] that losing my husband helped me find deeper gratitude for the kindness of my friends, the love of my family and the laughter of children.
“I’m sharing this with you today in the hopes that on this day in your lives, with all the momentum and the joy, you can learn in life the lessons I only learned in death. Lessons about hope, about strength and about the light within us that will not be extinguished.” (A transcript of the full speech is at www.tinyurl.com/sandberg-speech.)
Sandberg is the author of “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.” For Mother’s Day this month, she wrote on Facebook (www.tinyurl.com/sandberg-mothers) that she did not realize how hard single working women had it until she became one herself. — jta