‘The last thing I ever said to him was, ‘I’m falling asleep’. ” So begins Sheryl Sandberg’s account of how, on May 5th, 2015, sometime after 3.41pm, her much-loved husband Dave Goldberg, the father of their two young children, died suddenly in a gym while they were on a weekend break in Mexico. The life Sandberg had known came to a crashing end.
And so began the rest of her life; a life she never would have chosen, and was completely unprepared for. She describes unsparingly the choking grief that followed. Her grief was a demanding companion, always there under the surface, but then suddenly pulsing through her as if it was going to tear her heart right out of her body.
She worried incessantly that her young children would never again be happy. Some of the most harrowing accounts in the book are of their grief. On the day of the funeral, the children arrived at the cemetery, got out of the car, and fell to the ground, unable to take another step. The image of their mother lying on the grass with them, holding them as they wailed, their cousins piling up around them in a vain effort to protect them from their sorrows, could have come straight from a Greek tragedy.
<em>Option B</em> intersperses her wrenching story with this research, and, for the most part, this works very well
Two weeks after her husband died, Sandberg received a letter from an acquaintance, a woman now in her 60s, who had been widowed a few years earlier, who said that she was several years ahead of her on the sad widow’s path, as was another close friend, and neither felt the pain had lessened. She said she wished she had good advice to offer, but she didn’t. Being told this destroyed Sandberg’s hope that she would ever again be happy.
She called her friend Adam Grant, a psychologist and professor at the Wharton School of Business. He flew across the country to convince her that she and her children would recover, telling her about the psychological research on grief and resilience. This book is their joint attempt to share what they learned from each other.
Wrenching story
Option B intersperses her wrenching story with this research, and, for the most part, this works very well. Her vivid examples illuminate the psychological principles. But, occasionally, the transition is awkward, disrupting the flow of the book. This is especially the case when she also tries to cover dealing with other kinds of stress and adversity – including the effects of poverty, racism, rape and discrimination.
Sandberg was clearly stung by the sharp criticism she received when she published her last book, Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead: how could she, a billionaire businesswoman, possibly understand the dilemmas faced by ordinary working women, especially lone parents? She attempts to answer these criticisms in this book by including pages of research on the particular stresses lone parents face.
The book is packed full of helpful advice on how to handle grief, how to deal with grieving children, and the ways family, friends, colleagues and organisations can best help
She readily acknowledges that “I didn’t get it” and that her understanding and expectations of what a family looks like has shifted closer to reality. But a paragraph that includes sentences like the following grinds the story to a halt: “We need to embrace all families regardless of the different forms they take and provide the help they need to get through the hardships they face . . . We need stronger social insurance policies and more family-friendly business practices . . .”
That said, the book is packed full of helpful advice on how to handle grief, how to deal with grieving children, and the ways family, friends, colleagues and organisations can best help. For example, Sandberg counsels people not to ask “How are you?” but rather “How are you today?” allowing the bereaved person to reflect the often minute-to-minute ebb and flow of grief. She offers the “platinum rule of friendship”: treat others as they want to be treated. Take your cue from them and respond with understanding – or, better still, action.
She offers many examples of the way her own friends tried to help her, but she was clearly hurt by the way others let her down in her moment of need. One person told her to her face that she was so depressed and angry that she was “hard to be around”.
Her own family’s response was striking. Her mother came to stay for a month, helping to take care of her and her children. In an echo of how she lay down with her weeping children in the cemetery, her own mother lay down with her every night, holding her as she cried herself to sleep. When she left, Sandberg’s sister took her place. Her brother, who lived in Texas, called her every day for six months. If Sandberg is to be envied, it is more for having such a loving family, rather than her fortune. Being loved like that is her real privilege.
Friends with demons
Sandberg gives us occasional glimpses of her humour. She describes her struggle to follow the Buddhist principle of accepting suffering, of making friends with your demons. “I wasn’t going out for a drink with my demons,” she says, “but I accepted them; they did haunt me less.” The rabbi who led her husband’s funeral offered her similar advice: “Lean in to the suck” – expect it to be awful. “Not exactly what I meant when I said ‘lean in’,” she observes wryly, acknowledging it was good advice.
In the book, Sandberg often uses the phrase “elephant in the room” as a metaphor for what is left unsaid. The “elephant” in this book, what is left unsaid, but clear as day, is the commitment and iron discipline she showed in following the lessons she learned from the psychological research she read, and the good advice she got from friends. These personal qualities were already abundantly on show in how she built her career. She now put them to work in her private life – helping herself and her children to recover from their grief, and to find again some measure of happiness.
A few weeks after her husband died, his friend offered to fill in for him at some kind of father-son activity. In tears, Sandberg replied, “But I want Dave.” Her friend put his arm around her and said, “Option A is not available. So let’s just kick the shit out of Option B.” Life is never perfect, Sandberg says. We all live some form of Option B, so let’s kick the shit out of it.
And that’s just what Sandberg did. Spectacularly.
Dr Maureen Gaffney is a psychologist and author of Flourishing (Penguin)
