What Sheryl Sandberg gets right about life after death

 

When Sheryl Sandberg's husband died suddenly two years ago at the age of 47, she noticed that her friends and co-workers were hesitant to talk about it and that she was reluctant to talk about it herself.

In her new book, "Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy," out next week, the Facebook COO and Lean In entrepreneur writes about the unexpected death of her husband, David Goldberg, and the mourning process that followed.

 

Peggy Drexler

 

It isn't the first time Sandberg has written about her experiences with love and loss. Less than a month after Goldberg's death, she took to Facebook to write a public post about the previous 30 days.

"I think when tragedy occurs, it presents a choice," she wrote at the time. "You can give into the void, the emptiness that fills your heart, your lungs, constricts our ability to think or even breathe. Or you can try to find meaning." 

 

The post has since received nearly a million likes, inspiring 75,000 comments from men and women sharing their own stories of grief and loss. After that, Sandberg told The Guardian, "I didn't feel alone anymore." 

 

She began to understand that it wasn't that people didn't want to talk to her. It was that they didn't know how.

So it's no surprise that Sandberg has progressed from writing a Facebook post to writing a grief memoir, a form of writing as old as time. In deciding to write a full-length book about her grieving process, Sandberg takes that dialogue a step further, making it even easier for those afraid to broach the subject with her to speak up. In other words, she creates a new avenue for communication. 

 

But it's not just friends and family who benefit from this kind of prose. There's evidence that writing about yourself can be cathartic -- even if you never plan to share that writing with the world or anyone at all. Reflective writing has been shown to have both physical and emotional health benefits, including decreasing anxiety, rage and depression and increasing control and creativity.