Back To Life

When her husband died suddenly, the Lean In author fell into an abyss of pain.Here’s how she climbed out.

- Sheryl Sandberg

“NO ONE EVER TOLD ME,” C.S. Lewis wrote, “that grief felt so like fear.” But after Dave’s death, the fear was constant, and it felt like the anguish would never subside. In the worst of the void, two weeks after, I got a letter from a widow who wrote, “Try as I might, I can’t come up with a single thing that I know will help you.” I felt the void closing in, years stretching before me endless and empty. But with the support of friends and family and some practical wisdom drawn from research on how others coped with loss, I survived—and grew stronger. These are some of the lessons that helped me along the way.

1 YOU CAN GROW RESILIENCE.

Resilience is like a muscle. It can be strengthened. Yes, I hurt. My young son and daughter hurt. Those feelings would need to run their course, and I would be vulnerable. But my beliefs and actions could shape how quickly I moved through grief and where it took me, and seeing me work through it would show my family they’d be okay, too. Experts say that after six months, more than half of those who lose a spouse are past the acute stage of mourning. At first that seemed unimaginable. But planting seeds of resilience and knowing they would eventually yield emotional stamina gave me hope.

2 AVOID THE THREE P’S. 

As I worked to get back on my feet, I found that people who’ve suffered devastating loss face a few common hurdles, the so-called three P’s. When I read about them in a book by Martin Seligman, PhD, I teared up, realizing they were the very things keeping me from moving forward. They are: