WATCH ABOVE: It’s been a month since Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg lost her husband, David Goldberg. Sandberg is opening up about how she is dealing with her loss. Elaine Quijano reports.
TORONTO – Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has opened up about her late husband, David Goldberg, in a heartbreaking letter.
The letter detailed Sandberg’s struggle in coming to terms with her husband’s sudden death last month.
“I think when tragedy occurs, it presents a choice. You can give in to the void, the emptiness that fills your heart, your lungs, constricts your ability to think or even breathe. Or you can try to find meaning,” Sandberg wrote in an open letter on Facebook Wednesday.
“These past thirty days, I have spent many of my moments lost in that void. And I know that many future moments will be consumed by the vast emptiness as well. But when I can, I want to choose life and meaning.”
The post marks the end of her husband’s sheloshim, a thirty-day period of mourning observed in the Jewish tradition.
“I have lived thirty years in these thirty days. I am thirty years sadder. I feel like I am thirty years wiser,” she wrote.
Goldberg died after suffering severe head trauma in an exercise accident. He was found lying next to a treadmill at the Four Seasons Resort Punta Mita near Puerto Vallarta.
The 47-year-old worked for a number of tech companies throughout his career including Yahoo. He joined SurveyMonkey in 2009. Goldberg and Sandberg married in 2004 and had two children.
Sandberg rose to international fame after publishing her 2011 book Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead. In it, Sandberg wrote of the adjustments she and her husband had to make to manage two high-profile careers while raising two children.
In dealing with the loss of her husband, Sandberg said she gained a deeper understanding about motherhood.
“I have gained a more profound understanding of what it is to be a mother, both through the depth of the agony I feel when my children scream and cry and from the connection my mother has to my pain,” she wrote.
“She has explained to me that the anguish I am feeling is both my own and my children’s, and I understood that she was right as I saw the pain in her own eyes.”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded to Sandberg’s post Wednesday in a show of support for his chief operating officer.
“Your ability to find meaning and clarity is deeply inspiring,” wrote Zuckerberg.
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