Option B

by Sheryl Sandberg

And making sure to integrate different perspectives into a coherent story builds a sense of control, particularly for boys.

Nostalgia is literally the suffering that we feel when we yearn for the past to come back to us, yet psychologists find that it is mostly a pleasant state. After people reflect on an event, they tend to feel happier and more connected to others. They often find life more meaningful and become inspired to create a better future. Rather

Photos are important because happiness is remembered, not just experienced. And losing Dave taught me how precious video is: when I see photos of him, I long to see him move and hear him speak. Now I take videos as much as possible. My kids used to duck whenever I began recording them,

“You should just go. And it’s okay if you’re crying. Everyone knows what happened to us.” Then he added, “Mom, they probably have things they cry about too, so you should just be yourself.” He was teaching me what I had tried to teach him.

“Some people say, ‘If there’s life, there’s hope,’ ” survivor Roberto Canessa explained. “But for us, it was the opposite: ‘If there’s hope, there’s life.’

Many wrote letters to their families declaring their will to live. “To maintain faith at all times, despite our setbacks, we had to become alchemists,” survivor Javier Methol said. “Changing tragedy into a miracle, depression into hope.”

Researchers find that hope springs up and persists when “communities of people generate new images of possibility.” Believing in new possibilities helps people fight back against the idea of permanence and propels them to seek out new options; they find the will and the way to move forward.

That week, my kids and I went to Kara, a local grief support center. Meeting other people who were farther along in the same journey helped us overcome permanence by showing us that we wouldn’t be stuck in the void of acute grief forever.

My kids also attended Experience Camps, a free weeklong program for children who have lost a parent, sibling, or primary caregiver.

To join a community after tragedy, we often have to accept our new—and often unwelcome—identity. Writer Allen Rucker told us that after he became paralyzed, “I initially didn’t want to hang around people who were in wheelchairs. I didn’t want to belong to that club. I saw myself as a freak; I didn’t want to join the freak fraternity.” His mind didn’t change overnight. “It took four or five years. It almost felt like every cell in my brain had to transfer, one at a time, very slowly learning to accept this thing.”

The club that no one wants to belong to is incredibly bonding. Perhaps because none of us wanted to join, we cling to one another.

“A lot of times formerly incarcerated people don’t want to ask for help. We’re trying to get them to understand that it’s actually a sign of strength to recognize when you don’t have the skills to do something—and reach out for help. Wanting to improve is not a sign of weakness.”

Narratives might sound “light”—how important can a story be?—but they are how we explain our past and set expectations for our future. Just as family stories help children feel a sense of belonging, collective stories create identity for communities. And stories that emphasize values like equality are critical for pursuing justice.

“Moral elevation” describes the feeling of being uplifted by an act of uncommon goodness. Elevation brings out what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” Even in the face of atrocity, elevation leads us to look at our similarities instead of our differences. We see the potential for good in others and gain hope that we can survive and rebuild. We become inspired to express compassion and battle injustice. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.”

“Their extension of grace is rooted in a long-standing coping mechanism passed down from people who had no option in many cases but to forgive and move on while still leaving the door open for justice to be done. It takes you past raw vengeance. Forgiveness clears your head to pursue justice.”

Our invitation came from Elon Musk, the company’s CEO. The first time Elon and I crossed paths after Dave died, he told me how sorry he was and then added, “I understand how hard this is.” In 2002, Elon’s first child died suddenly at two and a half months old. We did not say much more and just sat together, bonded by grief.

Of the hundreds of answers, most had one thing in common: the majority of regrets were about failures to act, not actions that failed.

I also worried that this level of scrutiny might discourage risk taking. I was surprised that after every mission—and even after every training session—the Marines do formal debriefs. Then they record the lessons learned in a repository so that everyone can access them. The Marines taught me the importance of creating a culture where failure is seen as a learning opportunity.

The purpose of “M&Ms” is to review the cases of patients where something went seriously wrong and figure out how to prevent similar problems in the future.

He later noted, “This darn CV of failures has received way more attention than my entire body of academic work.”

Sue’s studies show that although fishing for compliments hurts your reputation, asking for criticism signals that you care about improving.

At Google, my colleague Joan Braddi explained that I wasn’t as persuasive as I could be in meetings because I often jumped in to speak early. She said that if I could be more patient and let others express their views first, I could make my arguments better by addressing their concerns. David Fischer, who runs our global teams at Facebook, often reminds me that I need to slow down and listen more.

In 2016, the Chicago Cubs won the World Series after a 108-year drought. General manager Theo Epstein explained why: “We will always spend more than half the time talking about the person rather than the player….We would ask our scouts to provide three detailed examples of how these young players faced adversity on the field and responded to it, and three examples of how they faced adversity off the field. Because baseball is built on failure. The old expression is that even the best hitter fails seven out of ten times.”

Accepting feedback is easier when you don’t take it personally. Being open to criticism means you get even more feedback, which makes you better. One way to lessen the sting of criticism is to evaluate how well you handle it. “After every low score you receive,” law professors Doug Stone and Sheila Heen advise, you should “give yourself a ‘second score’ based on how you handle the first score….Even when you get an F for the situation itself, you can still earn an A+ for how you deal with it.”

Byron showed me that building resilient teams and organizations takes open and honest communication. When companies fail, it’s usually for reasons that almost everyone knows but almost no one has voiced.

talked about how a single sentence can make people more open to negative feedback: “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.”

decided to open up in the hope that it might help others with hardships in their lives. I spoke about the three P’s and what deep grief felt like. I admitted that I had not understood how hard it was to be a single parent or to stay focused at work when you’re struggling at home. I was worried that I wouldn’t get through the speech without crying…and I didn’t. Still, by the end, I felt a sense of relief. In the weeks that followed, others at work started opening up as well. Together, we sent a bunch of elephants stampeding right out of our building.

She said she was scared but did not want to give up a role she’d been working toward for so many years. Together, we laid out a plan for her to take the new job. “I had to jettison the notion of being a ‘fearless leader,’ ” Caryn said. Instead, the first time she addressed the two-hundred-person global communications team, she spoke openly about her diagnosis. She was undergoing daily radiation treatments,

“You’d think sharing would slow you down, but it takes time and energy to hide things,” Caryn said. Being more open personally led people to be more open professionally. Caryn’s team used to discuss “lessons learned” in one-on-one meetings, but most people were not comfortable discussing failure in larger groups. “Lessons learned” is now something that the full team has embraced. “Before, we used to talk about what went well,” Caryn said. “Now, we cover what went wrong too.”

On her first day of treatment, I gave her a necklace with the letters “YGT.” She was confused at first since her initials are “CLM.” I explained that it was a symbol of my faith in her and stood for “You’ve got this.” “I now say ‘YGT’ to my team all the time,” Caryn said. “And they say it to each other. YGT. It means so much.”

She said, “I didn’t die. Mel did and Dave did, but I am alive. And I am going to live.” She put her arm around me and said, “And you are going to live too.” Then she completely stunned me by adding, “And you are not only going to live, but you are going to get remarried one day—and I am going to be there to celebrate with you.”

Marne reminded me that being alone can be an empowering choice. In a landmark fifteen-year study of changes in marital status among more than 24,000 people, getting married increased average happiness only a little bit; on a scale of 0 to 10, single people who were at a 6.7 in happiness might increase to a 6.8 after getting married. That tiny boost occurred around the time of the wedding and typically faded within a year. If one of the participants lost a spouse and did not remarry, eight years later on average their happiness would be a 6.55. It turns out that people who choose to be single are very satisfied with their lives. “Singles are stereotyped, stigmatized, and ignored,” psychologist Bella DePaulo finds, “and still live happily ever after.”

Now I encourage my friends and family to express their fears and desires to their partners. Love is the third rail of grief—a topic so charged that it is untouchable. After losing a partner, the only thing more emotionally fraught than finding joy is finding love.

A childhood friend of mine who is now a rabbi told me that in the Jewish religion, mourning for a parent, child, or sibling is a year, but mourning for a spouse is just thirty days. “The rabbis wanted people to move forward,” he said.

Women are expected to carry the torch of love, and when that flame is extinguished they are supposed to mourn for it longer. The weeping widow lives up to our expectations. The widow who dances and dates does not. These differences reflect a double standard rooted in a range of issues, from women feeling more guilt and anxiety about new romances to a greater cultural acceptance of men marrying younger women to the demographic reality of women living longer than men.

“There will always be someone who will not understand why you’ve chosen to date again,” he lamented. “They may give you a hard time or have some silly notion that widows and widowers shouldn’t fall in love again. Their opinions do not matter. All that matters is that you’re ready to date again. You don’t need to justify your actions.” People who have lost a spouse feel enough grief and guilt on their own. Judging them makes those feelings worse.

“I almost hate to say this, but I am the happiest I have ever been in my life,” she told me. “Sometimes it takes going through something so awful to realize the beauty that is out there in this world.”

People who laugh naturally six months after losing a spouse cope better. Couples who laugh together are more likely to stay married. Physiologically, humor lowers our heart rate and relaxes our muscles. Evolutionarily, humor is a signal that a situation is safe. Laughter breaks tension by making stressful situations less threatening.

When you take a horrible situation and add a punch line to it, for at least a moment you have shifted the balance of power: the helpless become the victors and the underdog gets the last word. Mel Brooks said he made fun of Hitler and the Nazis because “if you can reduce them to ridicule then you’re way ahead.” For centuries, jesters were the only people who could speak truth to power and had permission to challenge a king or queen. Today in the United States, late-night TV comedians play this role.

One of the most important things I’ve learned is how deeply you can keep loving someone after they die. You may not be able to hold them or talk to them, and you may even date or love someone else, but you can still love them every bit as much. Playwright Robert Woodruff Anderson captured it perfectly: “Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship.”

Now that Dave was gone, our cute how-we-met story was no longer cute. Asking people how they met their deceased partner seems cruel so no one does it. But for the widow or widower, not asking means they miss out on the nostalgia of recalling those early romantic days. I called Tracy Robinson and we agreed that from now on, we would both ask the members of our club how they met their partner to give them a chance to remember the excitement of that first encounter.

They were able to predict divorce over the next six years with 83 percent accuracy. A key was buried in the couples’ conversations, which often started with bids for attention, affection, support, or laughter. We are making a bid whenever we say things like “Hey, look at that bird!” or “Are we out of butter?” When a partner makes a bid, the other partner has two choices: to turn away or turn toward. Turning away means dismissing or ignoring the bid. Stop talking about birds, I’m watching TV. Turning toward means engaging. Yep, I’ll go get some

She often said there were three parties in any relationship: you, the other person, and the relationship itself. The relationship is a meaningful entity that needs to be protected and nurtured.

In the couples whose marriages lasted, instead of escalating negativity, both partners showed humor and affection. They took responsibility for their problems and found ways to compromise. They sent signals that even though they were fighting, at a deeper level, they were okay.

“I looked at your daughter and wanted her to know her world had changed forever, and it was so unfair, but it wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was just life. I wanted her to love herself. And I wanted my daughter to love herself. But how could I expect her—and my son—to do that when their own mother did not?”

Resilience in love means finding strength from within that you can share with others. Finding a way to make love last through the highs and lows. Finding your own way to love when life does not work out as planned. Finding the hope to love and laugh again when love is cruelly taken from you. And finding a way to hang on to love even when the person you love is gone.

At Dave’s funeral, I said that if on the day I walked down the aisle with him, someone had told me that we would have only eleven years together, I would still have walked down that aisle. Eleven years of being Dave’s wife and ten years of being a parent with him is perhaps more luck and more happiness than I could ever have imagined. I am grateful for every minute we had.

Dave, I promise to raise your children so that they know who you were—and everyone here can help me do that by sharing your stories with us. And Dave, I will raise your children so that they know what you wanted for them and that you loved them more than anything in the world. Dave, I promise to try to live a life that would make you proud. A life of doing my best, being the friend you were to our friends, following your example in trying to make the world a better place, and always—but always—cherishing your memory and loving our family. Today we will put the love of my life to rest, but we will bury only his body. His spirit, his soul, his amazing ability to give is still with all of us. I feel it in the stories people are sharing of how he touched their lives, I see it in the eyes of our family and friends, and above all, it is in the spirit and resilience of our children. Things will never be the same—but the world is better for the years Dave Goldberg lived.