Finding Life After Death

Faced with the sudden loss of her beloved husband, Facebook’s million-dollar COO Sheryl Sandberg shares how grief has shaped the person she is now.

When you are one of the world’s 20 most powerful women in business, it might beggar belief that most of your colleagues treat you as if you were invisible.

That was, however, what Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg confronted when she returned to work 10 days after her husband, David Goldberg, chief of web-based survey company SurveyMonkey, died suddenly on May 1, 2015, while they were on a couples-only holiday in Mexico.

As the 48-year-old writes in her second book, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience and Finding Joy, which was launched last April: “Walking around the Facebook campus, I started to feel like a ghost, somehow frightening and invisible at the same time.” Her description of appearing to be an apparition to her workmates is spot-on, as any survivor of, say, cancer, who returns to work could tell you.

It got so bad, she adds, that she “sought refuge” with her boss, Mark Zuckerberg, in his conference room. There, he explained to her that their colleagues “wanted to stay close” to her but “did not know what to say”, which was why they were seemingly cold, distant and stilted, when previously they had been almost like family to her.

Sheryl’s husband had been running on a treadmill in the hotel’s gym when his heart gave out. He fell off the exercise machine, hit his head and was lying in a pool of blood when Sheryl found him. The couple were attending a friend’s 50th birthday celebration in Mexico.

HEARTBREAKING DISCOVERY

A frantic dash to the hospital only resulted in the worst news. Her husband had died of an undiagnosed medical condition. Sheryl was then faced with the horrific task of telling their young children that their father was dead.