TECH

Read Sheryl Sandberg's touching Facebook post on mourning husband

Jessica Durando
USA TODAY
Dave Goldberg and his wife, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, shown here during a conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, last summer.


Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg took to the social media site on Wednesday to write about mourning the loss of her husband, Dave Goldberg.

The SurveyMonkey CEO died in early May from accidental blunt force trauma while exercising.

Sandberg writes:

"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. 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."

For Sandberg, today is the end of the Judaism period called sheloshim — the first 30 days after a significant other dies. She describes it as "the completion of religious mourning for a spouse."

"I have lived thirty years in these thirty days. I am thirty years sadder. I feel like I am thirty years wiser," Sandberg writes on Facebook.

Goldberg was found lying beside a treadmill in a gym of a private suite in Punta Mita, an exclusive vacation retreat north of Puerto Vallarta. The prosecutors' office in Nayarit State told USA TODAY that Goldberg appeared to have lost his grip on the exercise equipment's railings, fallen backward and hit his head. The resulting wound was an inch long, and Goldberg lost consciousness.

Hours after the accident, Goldberg was found alive by his brother Robert and was rushed to a hospital 20 minutes away in Nuevo Vallarta, where he died.

Sandberg acknowledges that the way she treated others going through devastating events in their lives was "all wrong before."

She writes, "I have learned that I never really knew what to say to others in need. I tried to assure people that it would be okay, thinking that hope was the most comforting thing I could offer. Real empathy is sometimes not insisting that it will be okay but acknowledging that it is not."