“Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience and Finding Joy” by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant

Sheryl Sandberg had been married to her husband, Dave Goldberg, for eleven years when he collapsed during a vacation to Mexico in 2015 and died from a cardiac arrhythmia. Her book, “Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience and Finding Joy,” reveals how she came to terms with the loss.

Initially, Sandberg felt abandoned. She worried about the future of their two children. “Ordinary events became land mines,” she wrote. “Milestone days were even more heart-wrenching.” The book’s title came from the advice of a friend, with whom she’d shared her distress about finding a replacement for a father-child activity. “Option A is not available,” he’d told her. “So let’s just kick the shit out of Option B.”

Drawing on her personal experience, as well as the stories of others who’ve struggled, Sandberg offers valuable advice for anyone facing adversity — which will be, as she points out, all of us:

We all encounter hardships. Some we see coming; others take us by surprise. It can be as tragic as the sudden death of a child, as heartbreaking as a relationship that unravels, or as disappointing as a dream that goes unfulfilled. The question is: When these things happen, what do we do next?

While acknowledging that there’s no cure for grief, Sandberg offers deceptively simple methods for developing resilience, such as avoiding what psychologist Martin Seligman identified as the “3 Ps” — personalization, pervasiveness and permanence. “Recognizing that negative events aren’t personal, pervasive, or permanent makes people less likely to get depressed and better able to cope,” Sandberg wrote. She walks us through her own learning process, in which she banishes certain words from her vocabulary — such as “sorry,” “always” and “never” — and draws on advice from a rabbi to “lean in to the suck.”

Her Book “Option B” Advises Friends of the Bereaved

Sheryl Sandberg announces her engagement to Tom Bernthal on her Instagram

Sandberg also provides useful guidance to anyone supporting grieving friends and loved ones. After a month of feeling isolated, Sandberg, who is the COO of Facebook, eventually posted a personal message on the platform acknowledging the challenges of comforting the bereaved and describing how a casual greeting like “How are you?” could be hurtful by failing to acknowledge her loss. As she explained in a video conversation with Adam Grant, a psychologist friend and co-author of the book:

At that point it wasn’t just the grief, which was overwhelming and felt like my chest was closing in on me and I couldn’t breathe. It was really a feeling of increasing isolation. I think people around me, other than my very closest friends, were so afraid to say the wrong thing they often said nothing at all.

Sandberg, who is also the author of “Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead,” continues to make the best of “Option B.” She’s created a website, also called Option B, to connect people who are coping with similar challenges and provide resources. Shortly after the pandemic began, the site began offering a free excerpt from the book, in addition to other tools to deal with hardship.

“Resilience is the strength and speed of our response to adversity — and we can build it,” wrote Sandberg, who recently became engaged again. “It isn’t about having a backbone. It’s about strengthening the muscles around our backbone.”