Option B

by Sheryl Sandberg

And so began the rest of my life. It was—and still is—a life I never would have chosen, a life I was completely unprepared for.

Grief is a demanding companion. In those early days and weeks and months, it was always there, not just below the surface but on the surface. Simmering, lingering, festering. Then, like a wave, it would rise up and pulse through me, as if it were going to tear my heart right out of my body. In those moments, I felt like I couldn’t bear the pain for one more minute, much less one more hour.

My friend Davis Guggenheim told me that as a documentary filmmaker, he has learned to let the story reveal itself. He doesn’t start each project knowing where the tale will end because it has to unfold in its own way and in its own time. Worried that I would try to control my grief, he encouraged me to listen to it, keep it close, and let it run its course.

“No one ever told me,” C. S. Lewis wrote, “that grief felt so like fear.” The fear was constant and it felt like the grief would never subside. The waves would continue to crash over me until I was no longer standing, no longer myself.

after losing a parent, many children are surprisingly resilient. They go on to have happy childhoods and become well-adjusted adults. Hearing the despair in my voice triggered by the letter, Adam flew back across the country to convince me that there was a bottom to this seemingly endless void. He wanted to tell me face-to-face that while grief was unavoidable, there were things I could do to lessen the anguish for myself and my children. He said that by six months, more than half of people who lose a spouse are past what psychologists classify as “acute grief.” Adam convinced me that while my grief would have to run its course, my beliefs and actions could shape how quickly I moved through the void and where I ended up.

The question is: When these things happen, what do we do next? I thought resilience was the capacity to endure pain, so I asked Adam how I could figure out how much I had. He explained that our amount of resilience isn’t fixed, so I should be asking instead how I could become resilient. Resilience is the strength and speed of our response to adversity—and we can build it. It isn’t about having a backbone. It’s about strengthening the muscles around our backbone.

When I was on the other side, my reply became, “I can’t imagine either, but I have no choice.”

I had no choice but to wake up every day. No choice but to get through the shock, the grief, the survivor guilt. No choice but to try to move forward and be a good mother at home. No choice but to try to focus and be a good colleague at work.

And Adam, patient yet insistent that the darkness would pass, but that I would have to help it along. That even in the face of the most shocking tragedy of my life, I could exert some control over its impact.

“But I want Dave.” He put his arm around me and said, “Option A is not available. So let’s just kick the shit out of Option B.” Life is never perfect. We all live some form of Option B. This book is to help us all kick the shit out of it.

We plant the seeds of resilience in the ways we process negative events. After spending decades studying how people deal with setbacks, psychologist Martin Seligman found that three P’s can stunt recovery: (1) personalization—the belief that we are at fault; (2) pervasiveness—the belief that an event will affect all areas of our life; and (3) permanence—the belief that the aftershocks of the event will last forever. The three P’s play like the flip side of the pop song “Everything Is Awesome”—“everything is awful.” The loop in your head repeats, “It’s my fault this is awful. My whole life is awful. And it’s always going to be awful.”

Hundreds of studies have shown that children and adults recover more quickly when they realize that hardships aren’t entirely their fault, don’t affect every aspect of their lives, and won’t follow them everywhere forever. Recognizing that negative events aren’t personal, pervasive, or permanent makes people less likely to get depressed and better able to cope.

Then I brought up the two other P’s: pervasiveness and permanence. We talked about all the good in other areas of her life and I encouraged her to think about how the despair would feel less acute with time.

so it was irrational for me to believe that I could have. I hadn’t interrupted everyone’s lives; tragedy had. No one thought I should apologize for crying. Once I tried to stop saying “sorry,” I found myself biting my tongue over and over and started letting go of personalization.

had loving family, friends, and colleagues; I marveled at how they were carrying me and my children—quite literally at times. I felt closer to them than I ever would have thought possible. Going back to work helped with pervasiveness too. In the Jewish tradition, there is a seven-day intense mourning period known as shiva, after which most regular activities are supposed to resume.

Work gave me a place to feel more like myself, and the kindness of my colleagues showed me that not all aspects of my life were terrible.

I have long believed that people need to feel supported and understood at work. I now know that this is even more important after tragedy. And sadly, it’s far less common than it should be.

The fear of forever without Dave was paralyzing.

When we’re suffering, we tend to project it out indefinitely. Studies of “affective forecasting”—our predictions of how we’ll feel in the future—reveal that we tend to overestimate how long negative events will affect us.

Just as the body has a physiological immune system, the brain has a psychological immune system. When something goes wrong, we instinctively marshal defense mechanisms. We see silver linings in clouds. We add sugar and water to lemons. We start clinging to clichés. But after losing Dave, I wasn’t able to do any of this. Every time I tried to tell myself things would get better, a louder voice inside my head insisted that they would not.

Seligman found that words like “never” and “always” are signs of permanence. Just as I had to banish “sorry” from my vocabulary, I tried to eliminate “never” and “always” and replace them with “sometimes” and “lately.” “I will always feel this awful” became “I will sometimes feel this awful.” Not

I also tried a cognitive behavioral therapy technique where you write down a belief that’s causing you anguish and then follow it with proof that the belief is false.

A psychiatrist friend explained to me that humans are evolutionarily wired for both connection and grief: we naturally have the tools to recover from loss and trauma. That helped me believe that I could get through this.

thought about how humans had faced love and loss for centuries, and I felt connected to something much larger than myself—connected to a universal human experience. I

My mom taught me how to breathe through the waves of anxiety: breathe in for a count of six, hold my breath for a count of six, then exhale for a count of six.

Rabbi Nat Ezray, who led Dave’s funeral, told me to “lean in to the suck”—to expect it to be awful.

“Part of every misery,” C. S. Lewis wrote, is “misery’s shadow…the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer.”

Taking my rabbi’s advice and accepting that this completely sucked helped a great deal. Instead of being surprised by the negative feelings, I expected them.

actually lessens our pain because we end up “making friends with our own demons.” I wasn’t going out for a drink with my demons, but as I accepted them, they did haunt me less.

I gave this advice to my kids but also had to take it myself. Leaning in to the suck meant admitting that I could not control when the sadness would come over me.

It occurred to me that dealing with grief was like building physical stamina: the more you exercise, the faster your heart rate recovers after it is elevated. And sometimes during especially vigorous physical activity, you discover strength you didn’t know you had.

But during the early days of despair, my instinct was to try to find positive thoughts. Adam told me the opposite: that it was a good idea to think about how much worse things could be.

People who enter the workforce during an economic recession end up being more satisfied with their jobs decades later because they are acutely aware of how hard it can be to find work. Counting blessings can actually increase happiness and health by reminding us of the good things in life. Each night, no matter how sad I felt, I would find something or someone to be grateful for.

The death of a partner often brings severe financial consequences—especially for women, who frequently earn less than men and have less access to retirement benefits. In

Single parents and widows deserve more support, and leaders, coworkers, families, and neighbors can commit to providing it.

We all deal with loss: jobs lost, loves lost, lives lost. The question is not whether these things will happen. They will, and we will have to face them.

Resilience comes from deep within us and from support outside us. It comes from gratitude for what’s good in our lives and from leaning in to the suck. It comes from analyzing how we process grief and from simply accepting that grief. Sometimes we have less control than we think. Other times we have more.

I learned that when life pulls you under, you can kick against the bottom, break the s...

learned that when life pulls you under, you can kick against the bottom, break the su...

Hello, Elephant. “Jeff,” I said, “how are you? I mean, really, how are you? How are you feeling? Are you scared?”

When someone shows up with a cast, we immediately inquire, “What happened?” If your ankle gets shattered, people ask to hear the story. If your life gets shattered, they don’t.

It wasn’t until breakfast with Jeff that I realized I was sometimes the friend who avoided painful conversations. I had failed to ask him directly about his health not because I didn’t care, but because I was worried about upsetting him. Losing Dave taught me how ludicrous that was. It wasn’t possible for me to remind Jeff that he was living with MS. He was aware of that every minute of every day. Even people who have endured the worst suffering often want to talk about it.

Parents who have suffered the worst loss imaginable often share this sentiment. Author Mitch Carmody said after his nine-year-old son Kelly died from a brain tumor, “Our child dies a second time when no one speaks their name.” This is why the Compassionate Friends, one of the largest bereavement organizations in the United States, encourages families to speak openly and frequently about the children they have lost.

desk next to us at work will often say nothing,” Maxine said. “For the victim of racism, like the victim of loss, the silence is crippling. The two things we want to know when we’re in pain are that we’re not crazy to feel the way we do and that we have support. Acting like nothing significant is happening to people who look like us denies us all of that.”

Unlike non-question-asking friends, openers ask a lot of questions and listen to the answers without judging. They enjoy learning about and feeling connected to others. Openers can make a big difference in times of crisis, especially for those who are normally reticent.

Openers are not always our closest friends. People who have faced adversity tend to express more compassion toward others who are suffering.

I had become a member of a club that no one wants to belong to—a club that I did not even know existed before I joined involuntarily.

Many people who had not experienced loss, even some very close friends, didn’t know what to say to me or my kids. Their discomfort being around us was palpable, especially in contrast to our previous ease. As the elephant in the room went unacknowledged, it started acting up, trampling over my relationships. If friends didn’t ask how I was doing, did that mean they didn’t care?

“There’s this relentless drive to mask the expression of our true underlying feelings.” Admitting that you’re having a rough time is “almost inappropriate.”

Anna Quindlen puts it more poetically. “Grief,” she writes, is “a whisper in the world and a clamor within. More than sex, more than faith, even more than its usher death, grief is unspoken, publicly ignored except for those moments at the funeral that are over too quickly.”