Sheryl Sandberg On Finding Love And A Deeper Joy, After Loss

Welcome to all there is, wherever you are in the world and in your grief, I'm glad you're here. My guest today is Cheryl Sandberg. She's a tech executive, philanthropist, and author. She was the chief operating officer of meta, formerly Facebook, from 2008 to 2022. Her husband, Dave Goldberg, died in 2015. He had a heart arrhythmia and collapsed on a treadmill while they were vacationing in Mexico. He was just 47 and their two kids were 10 and 7 years old. A month after his death, Cheryl wrote a Facebook post in which she said she would never feel pure joy again. But her outlook changed, and two years later, she wrote a book with her friend, Psychologist Adam Grant, called Option B, Facing Adversity, Building Resilience and Finding Joy. Cheryl and I talk a lot about resilience in this podcast and she has found joy again and love. Her husband, Dave's brother Rob, introduced her to Tom Bernthal whom she married in 2022. Rob even officiated their wedding. Cheryl has a very particular reason for coming on the podcast and I'm really glad she did because it's not a topic that people talk enough about. She's written an open letter addressed to adult children who've lost a parent and she's encouraging them to give permission to their surviving parent to find love again if their parent wants to. You can read the full letter on CNN.com and we'll link to it in our podcast show notes, but I want to just read you some excerpts from it before we begin. She writes, "I hope one day smiles, replaced tears and you can carry your parent's memory forward with love, not just longing. But I also hope that alongside your grief, you can hold the idea that your surviving parent deserves a chance at happiness. That doesn't mean finding new partners the answer for every widow or widower, but for some of us, it is one of the most hopeful paths forward. Because if you believed you would grow old with someone you loved, the emptiness of that share next to you can be not just hollow but terrifying. Just as your parent should do all he or she can to help you recover, you have a real opportunity and dare I say obligation to do the same for your widowed mother or father. Even though it might be almost achingly difficult, let your mother or father know that you support them if they want to look for love again. New love doesn't erase the old she writes. It just proves that there's more room in our hearts than we know. I talked with Cheryl a couple of weeks ago in New York. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you for having me. You've created, I think, by far the most meaningful place for anyone to talk about and think about grief and that is a, I think it's a gift you've given. You didn't have to do this. You have a lot of other stuff going on. I'm grateful this podcast exists. Well, thank you so much. grief is so lonely. Yeah, it is. It's lonely. Had you much experience with loss before your husband Dave died? None. I never really, I never thought about it. My parents are still alive. I had lost grandparents that was expected. They were older, natural deaths. I had no experience with this. What happened to Dave? We were at my friend Phil's 50th birthday party, the house we had rented in Mexico that afternoon, which I didn't realize was an important afternoon, right? We were playing settlers of Katana and iPads and I was falling asleep and then when I woke up, I figured he was at the gym or having a drink with Salmon or hanging out. So I get ready for dinner and he's still not back, which seems kind of weird. And I go wherever he's having cocktails and I'm looking around like, where's Dave? And no one had seen him. And then all of a sudden, I just, and remember my sister in law screaming, where's the gym? And we ran. And he was on the floor. And it was, it was lying on the floor. I looked at my elliptical machine, there was blood on his, on around his head. I mean, I screamed, his brother Rob was there. He screamed, people came, the ambulance came in the whole time. I kept saying he's blue, you know, I mean, sorry, this is so graphic, but like he's blue. His face is blue. Doesn't that mean he's not breathing? And everyone was like, calm down and then we got into the ambulance. The ambulance took forever, forever. I've never, nothing was that long. I felt like none of the cars would get out of the way. And then we got to the hospital and they put me in the room. Morning, my best friend was there and the doctor walked in a number of minutes later and had that look. And I knew. And he said, I have bad news for you. And you know, he's gone in one second that you're not prepared for and not even therefore. Just everything changes, absolutely everything changes. Your kids were not, were not there on the trip. At a seven-year-old daughter and a ten-year-old son, they were at home. I got home fast, like flew home overnight and you know what are you going to say to a seven and a ten-year-old? I'm lucky I had a friend Carol Geithner who actually her job. She had lost a parent and her job, she was a counselor to grieving children. Wow. And I called her and I was like, what do I say to my kids? What do I say to my kids? And I honestly think, I mean, there's so many bad moments in this, right? But the single worst moment was telling my children. She told me to be very direct. She said, say, you have bad news and then say, Dad died. That's what she told me to say. I mean, the words I have bad news, like think about what that normally means. School got canceled, like the car broke, like those words, like, I have bad news, like, I have life-shattering, earth-shattering, the world will never be the same news. But what you say is, why did she told me to say is, I have bad news. And I was there on the couch with my parents and my sister. And my kids obviously broke down and she prepared me, though, for something really interesting about young kids. She told me they were going to have moments seeming totally fine, going off and playing, and then moments of crying. And they would go off and play. And that's exactly what they did from the beginning. But I sit here with you, it's 11 years later. At seven and ten year old, they're 19 and 21, they're in college. And my daughter, for her senior class essay, she was asked to write an essay on something she's grateful for. And she wrote a paper she called the ode to death. And she said, it was the blessings of her dad's loss, to her dad's death, not that she doesn't miss him every day. She does. And she doesn't even really know him because she was seven. But the lessons she learned, the ways in which her life is deeper and more meaningful. And you feel that as well? I mean, I worked to get here. You know, when this happened, I'm very close with Adam Grant, he's like my psychologist friend. And I was like, how do I know if I'm going to get through this? How do I know if I have the strength to get through this, to get up every day without Dave, to get his kids dressed for school, to breathe, to walk through? Like how do I know if I can do this? And he said, you're asking me the wrong question, resilience is not something you have. It is a muscle, you build it. The question is not how much resilience you have, the question is how much resilience you're going to build. And then a few weeks later, you know, I live in California, he lives in Pennsylvania. I was talking to this woman and she said to me, and I'm sure she didn't mean to upset me, but she said, I wish I could tell you that it's going to get better. It never does. And I just called Adam, I'm like, it's never going to get better. You told me it's going to get better. It's never going to get better. And 20 hours later, I walked onto my kid's soccer field and Adam was there. He had gotten on a plane without telling me and flown across the country and was sitting there at the soccer field and looked at me and said, I'm here to tell you, not only is this going to get better, but we are going to make it better. Grief is like a terrible friend companion, right? It sits there. My brother and the Rob described it as a boot on your chest, you're walking through the world, I couldn't believe that people were at the grocery store or people were walking down the street. I'm like, don't they know Dave Dodd? That the world was still spinning. Yeah, but in those moments, knowing it can get better and it does, it really does. That's not a message, though, you would have believed in the first week. I didn't believe it. And one of the reasons I did the resilience work with Adam and eventually wrote a book was because I felt like not enough people were saying it. So a small percentage of people experience what is post-traumatic stress, it's like 15%. But more than half of people can experience something that psychologist Adam taught me this, called post-traumatic growth. Post-traumatic growth. And I want to be really clear about this, I would never choose this. I would never choose to have lost Dave, but there are ways in which for that terrible experience, your life is deeper, more meaningful, and even this is the hard thing, more joyful. How do you get there? You don't get there fast, but post-traumatic growth means that there's things about your life that are better. Not that your whole life is better, not that you would go through it, but things about it. More gratitude, I think, is the big one. Adam said to me early on as part of my recovery, he said, you know, two weeks in, he said, things could be worse. I'm like, I just walked into a gym and Dave was dead on the floor. He said, Dave could have had that cardiac arrhythmia driving your children. It hadn't occurred to me to be grateful my kids were alive, my kids were alive. All of a sudden I was like, I'm fine, I'm good. I'm now married, I got married seven years later, Tom is magnificent and he sleeps every night, he goes around me like this and his kind of breath is on my neck. And I am so grateful that he is alive and his joke is he managed to found a woman with the ultimate low bar, all he has to do is be alive like he breathes and he's a hero. But it's a deep lesson. I am grateful he is alive. I am grateful for every birthday. How do you help a 10 year old and a seven year old grieve? Because My mom did not know and nobody around me knew and I just buried it and my brother did as well and we all retreated to our separate corners and there's like even right now there's like a wall of tears ready to just like pop out and I'm 59 years old and it's crazy. You know and I wish I wish I had known at 11. Yeah, how to grieve. Sorry. I wish I could go back and like look at you at that age you know I certainly didn't know what to do. Carol was amazing. My dear friends, they showed up right away and they pulled their kids out of school so my kids would have someone to play with for a week. And I just followed them like when they wanted to grieve. I would lay there with them when they wanted to play. Carol told me never try to pull them and don't feel guilty or bad if they're okay for a minute take the minute so I let them go. But I also read a lot and I realized one of the things for children who lose their parents young is those memories get erased. So I've worked very hard over the years to keep Dave's memory alive. So you could talk about him with them and could they talk about him with you? All the time we talk about him all the time. And my husband Tom like from the minute we dated understands he's part of our life we have a photo wall in the house. There are always pictures of Dave at Tom and I and my kids we go to the grave twice a year. We go on October 2nd which would have been his birthday and we go on May 1st which is the day he died. And he's a huge part of our lives. Yes Lewis in his book which is about the death of his wife he talks about trying to talk to his stepkids about their mother. And I just want to read what he wrote he said I cannot talk to the children about her. The moment I tried their peers and their faces neither grief nor love nor fear more pity. But the most fatal of all non conductors embarrassment they look as if I were committing an indecency they are longing for me to stop. I can't blame them it's the way boys are. Finally later on one of those boys wrote the forward to a new edition of the book. And he gave his perspective of this moment and said that what see us Lewis got wrong is not that they didn't want to talk about their mom. They were desperate to but they were afraid that if they did they would break down crying and collapse and that they knew he would as well. And they couldn't stand that embarrassment. I talked to a lot of people who's had lost parents at young ages and there was just silence and the pictures went away and the memories went away and so I did the opposite. I made video I think about 70 people I sent out long questions and I hit people video. That's awesome. And so I actually have hundreds of hours of tape of people talking about Dave and actually in the last year I think my daughters watched almost every interview on my son's watch some two. And they are in touch with those people friends of dad's. And I love that he's still part of our lives and he deserves that. One of the things that your mom said to you in those first 30 days was she said that the anguish you were feeling was both your own and your children's which I thought was a really interesting idea that part of the pain you were feeling wasn't just your own pain. The pain of seeing your children go through this. Oh, it was terrible. It was terrible. We were at an event and all the little girls were on their dad's shoulders and my daughter came running up and grabbed my leg. Mom, I have no shoulders and I'm never going to have shoulders again. I mean, it was awful. One of the things that happened for me also was that I could silence any room by entering it after Dave died. I would walk in and everybody stopped talking. Nobody knows what to say. No one knows what to say, so they said nothing at all. And so 30 days in, 30 days is very meaningful in the Jewish religion. It's called Shella Sheam. It is the morning period for a spouse. Interestingly, Jewish morning for a parent or child or sibling is 11 months. But first of all, it's 30 days. And I wrote a post on Facebook publicly. And basically, it was like a plea to people to start talking to me. Like, please, here's what I'm going through. Could you talk to me? And don't say how are you because that is a terrible question. Like, how am I? You prefer how are you today or right now? How are you today? It acknowledges. And actually then, people started asking me, how are you today? It worked. You said that at the funeral when you went to the graveside with your kids, that they collapsed on the ground and that you sang to them. Yeah, and it's an amazing thing because I've become more spiritual since Dave died. I don't know. I don't know. What is God or is there something? But if there's a moment in my life that makes me believe in God, it is this moment. So I got out of the car and my son collapsed. He collapsed on the ground. And I couldn't get him up. And the song I started singing is a Jewish song called Osay Shalom, which I don't know if I've ever sang before in my life. Really? It just came to me. And then other people started singing. And it turns out that those are lines from the Jewish prayer for morning cottage. Maybe I knew that, but I don't think I did. And I think that was a moment where someone was like telling me it's gonna be okay. Is it okay if I play a little bit of what you sang? [Music] It's beautiful. I believe that was a divine moment. I do. I really do. Maybe the only one I've truly had, but that moment. And then fast forward about, I don't know, a year and a half later, my son's now 11. And the middle school basketball team loses the playoffs. And all the other boys are crying. And I looked at him. He looked fine. I said, "Are you okay?" He said, "Mom, they don't know." And I didn't need to ask him. I knew exactly what he meant. They don't know there's real things to be upset about. He was fine with losing the basketball playoffs. And that is the resilience. More of Cheryl Sandberg in a moment. I'm Audie Cornish. I'm Ari Shapiro. And it's engagement party. And we get to talk about what we're obsessed with, what we're engaged with, what we need to process with a friend. And one of the things that is everywhere in pop culture right now that I feel like we've been circling around for a while. So I'm glad we're finally doing an episode about it. Is sobriety? Recovery. Drinking less. These are all related and overlapping things. Getting louder and louder and louder. And we're going to have a guest, AJ Delario. He was a one time super editor of Gawker Media, which all came tumbling down in the midst of his addiction. sobriety for me is a complete psychic change as they called in 12 step. I have to figure out how to treat myself better and all aspects of my life. And that takes a lot more work than just stopping drinking. Follow engagement party. Wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, host of the Chasing Life Podcast. Big question we're asking, have we outsmarted the biological clock? The big stories, you know, Anne Hathaway, Natalie Portman, what is going on with AOC's egg freezing. That gets a lot of attention in the media. We know more women are having children in their 40s. Has something changed here or is it just that those stories are getting an outsized amount of attention? I think there is this common misconception. I'm seeing it a lot on social media where people are saying, you know, we're seeing evolution in real time. Right. Our biological clock isn't ticking the way it used to and that's not true. Unfortunately, it would take thousands of years to see that type of evolution take shape. Listen to Chasing Life. Streaming now. You wrote after 30 days, you and your children will find happiness again. My heart tells me. Yes, I believe that, but I know I will never feel pure joy again. Those who have said you will find a new normal, but it will never be as good come from me because they know and speak the truth. Do you think that's true that you'll never feel pure joy again? No. Please don't believe that. No, that's wrong. And Adam told me it was wrong when I wrote it. I think I feel more joy. I feel the joy you can feel when you know that every day is precious. To me, this was one of the great things I've learned, which I never realized is there is a link between grief and joy. It makes the joy deeper. It makes the joy deeper for sure. I wish I could go back and love my 46-year-old husband 12 years ago, knowing that he might just be gone. Maybe other people had that perspective. I didn't. I was getting up every day and hoping like lunches would get made and we'd get to school and I'd get to work. But I have so much gratitude. Even my wedding, so Tom and I got married four years ago, and two weddings is not something I ever wanted, right? Like, let's be clear. But the day I got married today, if I was thrilled, I found the person I was going to spend my whole life with. The day I got married to Tom was deeper. It was deeper because I had gone through the fear that I would be alone for the rest of my life and the knowledge that life is so precious. I mean, do you feel like you have moments where the joy is deeper for the loss? It's hard for me to tell because I really have not handled this well at all. So I never celebrate a birthday. Anything that's positive that happens, I can't allow it to permeate because then disappointment's gonna come. So I did not allow myself joy. I just undercut it and I'm onto the next thing. And so it's not a recipe for anything good, but having children, I have reason to be incredibly joyful and they bring me nothing but extraordinary joy. And they're four and six or they still like me and so I wanna hold my hand. And so for me, that is just pure joy and it's really what motivated me, I think, to start addressing grief because I do see the connection. - I think having children is what gave me the permission to have joy. When someone dies, there's so much guilt. You laugh, you feel bad, you're not grieving enough or you're not honoring them enough. And that is exactly the opposite. You need to recover for your kids to recover. And so because I was a mom, I recovered. I never celebrated birthdays before. I celebrate every single one because it is a gift. It is a gift. I just turned 57. I planned something for myself or my husband or a friend, every single one since Dave died. And not just mine, every friend I have. I give birthday gifts, I send balloons and there's more joy because they're so precious. And so I've been celebrating birthdays now for 11 years and nothing bad has happened. And so maybe right here, right now, I'm serious, I understand like, maybe why not? And show your kids how precious each one is, you're still alive. - This is something you wrote in the 30 day window after Dave died. You said, for me, the abiding lesson all this is that life is fleeting that we have very little control of some of the things that matter the most and that each day is a blessing. As Adam Grant taught me, we can fall forward and appreciate all we have even in the face of great loss. - I am more grateful than I was before Dave died. I'm grateful that I was his wife and that he was in the world. I'm sad that he's gone, but I really do feel a joy and gratitude for being alive. I started keeping a gratitude journal right away. I then started keeping a joy journal. I kept a journal of things I was doing well 'cause I thought I was just not capable of doing anything. But I think one of the problems with death, whether it's strike slowly or it strikes suddenly, is that you feel like you have absolutely no control of anything that matters. I think understanding that you actually make choices and no judgment, of course you're gonna grieve, but over time, let yourself, let yourself feel some joy and do it actually not just for you, it's not a selfish act. It's an act of honoring the person that is gone. - My brother-in-law, Rob, Dave's brother, we dropped the in-law a long time ago. - He said from the very beginning, Dave would have wanted you to be happy. His brother introduced you to your husband. - He did. My brother sent an email to my parents and my sister and he thought I wasn't on it. He said, "Someone needs to talk to Cheryl about dating again." And I was on the email. So I like broke back. I'm like, "Hello, on the email." - Just did. - You just did. But I got really lucky. I had all these moments early on a few months after Dave died. Everyone thinks about and talks about the moment where you start cleaning out the stuff, right? That's like a moment. And I did it a few months in with my mother-in-law, Dave's mom, and Rob. And we're cleaning out Dave's things and she's standing there and doing it. And I am on the floor like hysterical. And I looked around like, "How are you okay?" Paula, how are you doing this again? You did this for a husband. You're doing this for a son and she turned around, God bless her, she's gone now. And she said, "I am still alive." She said, "Mal, her husband died and Dave died, "but I am here and I am alive." And then she said, "And you are too." And then she, out of nowhere, we'd never talked about dating, said, "And you're gonna love again. "I'm gonna dance at your wedding." I'm gonna dance at your wedding. It's quite a mother-in-law. She had lost her husband 10 years before. And she had dated, I think she would have liked to get remarried and never did. She understood what I understood, which is that there's the loss of the person. And then there's the loss of what you thought you had in your future. Our kitchen table was where Dave and I always sat. And then when he was gone, that chair, his chair, no one sat in it. Looked so empty, but it wasn't just empty in that moment. I would literally sit there and I didn't mean to do this, but I would project myself out. I was gonna be 60, I was gonna be 70, I was gonna be sitting there by myself. My kids were gonna grow up. They were gonna go to college. And I'd always thought Dave and I would sit there. And I was gonna be alone. CS Lewis said something like, I never knew death felt so much like fear. And there was like fear to this for me. - You talk about a picture that was very important to you, this picture at the Southern tip of South Africa with you and Dave. What is it about this picture that became the one that you looked at the most? - It was my favorite picture before he passed away. We're on our honeymoon. We look so happy and also kind of young, right? I look a lot younger there, but it says the cape of good hope. And I think the word hope was like the hope of the marriage. And then when he died, when I looked at it, it was only tears. And then over the years, I smile. I remember, wow, look how happy we were. And, huh, his kids look kinda like him as they grow older, you know? - So it became more joyful. And then, in this part of why I'm here today, this summer, in August, so it's just a month or so ago, I went back to the cape of good hope with my now husband, Tom, his whole family, my son. And I don't know if I had really focused on the fact that I was going back to where that picture was, but I woke up that morning. And I just looked at Tom and I said, I just need you to know I'm grieving today. Like I just am. I do not wake up most mornings grieving, but I woke up and I said I'm grieving. And this part's interesting too. It's really only recently that I talk to my children as much about my grief. It's been theirs. I follow them to this day. When they grieve, I'm sad. When they're okay, I never want to bring it up, even now. But more and more, as they get older, they're very giving, I'm very giving children. They really care. And that day, I just said to my son, "Listen, I don't do this to you a lot, but I'm sad." Because I went on my honeymoon here. Like before you were born and I felt all was bad, bringing him into that. Like he's having a normal day. He's not thinking about it the same way. And he was grateful I did. And we went down there and I said to my son, I showed him the picture and he knew we were going together. And I said, I'm going to retake this picture with you. Not going to take it to Tom. I'm only going to take the picture with you. And then we drove down and I sat on the rocks right near there, like back here. And I still talked to Dave sometimes out loud. You still do. Not a lot, but sometimes like twice a year when I go to the grave and then every so often, but I talked to him and I was crying and then Tom came over and sat down. My son came over and they both were holding me. And then my son did the nicest thing he could have possibly done. He stood up on the rocks. He said, "Mom, get up, pick my hand up. "Help me get up." And he said, "We're going to go retake that picture now. "You're going to take one with me "and I want you to take one with Tom "because Dad would have been happy you have him. "And I am too. "That is so hard." And so now on my phone, I have this picture and then I have two, this one's still bigger, but I have two smaller pictures. One of me and my son and one of me and Tom. And it's on my phone and it is, it's the whole thing. It is the past, it is the present, it is the future and it is the knowledge that I think it's so counterintuitive that I think after death, you can love two people at the same time. Tom is with me today and I feel so lucky and I love him like deeply. And I still love Dave and those two things, they don't cancel each other out. They're not erasing Dave's memory. And I'm able to do that because Tom is generous and secure. He knows there's room for Dave and he makes that room and he wants pictures up in our house and he likes telling Dave's stories. He knew Dave not very well, but some. He talks about Dave and he finds friends of Dave's and he'll come back to the dinner table with the whole family and say, "I heard the best story about your dad today. "Someone told me that he helped them." One of the things he wrote, he said that new love doesn't erase the old, it just proves that there's more room in our hearts than we know. This is what I want people to know who are resisting to their parents dating when they're adults, is that new love doesn't erase the old. The past and the present can be present in the same space. Yeah, and I sat there and I was grieving for Dave and looking at the waves and I can miss him and love him and feel grief, rolling like a wave and ever since like a wave, we all know. And I can be grateful to my son and love Tom all at the same time. I speak pretty frequently to people who are widows or widowers. I always say two things, I always say, but I want you to know this is going to get better. Not it can get better, it will. No matter how bad it is, it's not as bad as it was the first day. It does get better. This is painful and terrible, horrific. But out of that pain can come some meaning and some joy in a way that that's deeper. But the second thing I always say is that in one day, if you want to, you can find love again. And to a person, every person kind of gasps, pauses, and then there's relief. And they say, thank you for saying that no one else has. And then almost as frequently they say, but I don't want to upset my children, not little kids. I'm time at grown children. I wrote this open letter about adult children giving their parents permission to find love again. And just so many people don't get that. And recently I've been having these conversations. That's why I wrote this letter that really are just so sad. There's a man I know he nursed his wife through cancer. I've not seen devotion like this. And I said, how are you? He said, I'm lonely. I'm alone all the time. My kids are with me, but they go home to their own homes. And I said, well, maybe you'll find love again. He said, I don't want to upset my kids. His kids are grownups. They have their own children. A man I know ended a relationship with someone he loves because of his daughter's reaction. I said, how old's your daughter? He said 37. I said, when did your wife die? He said four years ago. A woman who's a really devoted mother or boyfriend moved into her apartment. Her son now won't step foot into that apartment. He says, I don't want to see dad replaced. And look, you have children. I have children. The relationship from a parent to a child flows basically one way. We chose to have them. We give birth. We change diapers. We blow noses. We burp. We drop them at preschool and cry like we give to them and we should. Even when they get older, mainly it goes one way. But in death, in death, when you are a grown-up, you have a chance to do something for a parent. To give back to the parent in a way. Yeah. Dating is not for everyone. Love is not for everyone. But for me, the permission that I was able to find someone was just so, so important. You write in this open letter, you say, there comes a point when it falls to children to look back the other way. The loss of a parent is one of the hardest things a person will ever carry, so is the loss of a spouse. The question for families living inside both of those truths is, what do we do from here? How do we take care of each other? You go on to say, a new love does not erase the old. I think for some kids, that's the feeling is that you're erasing dad or you're erasing the memory of mom. Yeah, and look, it's painful. I have not lost a parent. I've lost a spouse. But watching your mom or dad go on a date with someone after your mom or dad dies, that's got to be terrible. It's terrible. Actually going on a date after your spouse dies is, I've done that. It's terrible. But the question is giving them permission to move on, permission, even encouragement. Your story is remarkable because you actually encouraged your mom. I did, yeah. My dad died when I was 10 and my brother was 12, and I desperately wanted my mom to get remarried. I longed for some adult male to step in and just talked to me or just be there. My mom started dating, actually, Sydney Lamette, who she had been married to prior to my dad. She started dating him again and my brother and I loved him and wanted her to marry him. I talked to my mom about it afterward. She was unaware that that was a wish of mine. She said it actually would have probably made a big impact on her, had I spoke about it. I wanted my mom to be happy. I wanted my mom to be whole and that would have helped. I don't fault the adult children who aren't doing this. I think they just haven't thought about it. But there are so many people whose adult children are rejecting a new love for them. And those adult children are going home often to their own partner's husband wives. And I don't think they're doing it on purpose. This is pain. It is touching pain. But I think the idea that you love both people, you still loved your dad, but you had room for, in this case, your mom's ex-husband. Yeah. What I like about the letter is that, I mean, it's an opportunity to start a conversation. Because the thing about parents is they don't want to be selfish. They don't want to say to their daughter, "Listen, I loved your mom too. I married her. I had kids with her. I nursed her for the last four years of cancer. I held her hand as she died. But now you go home to your husband and I don't want to be alone." To someone who's listening to this, somebody who's just experienced a loss or down the road, who thinks, "Oh, I could never do that. I could never do that to my kids. I could never do that." What would you say? I would say, "I don't know your experience." And there are unique circumstances. But I would say, "Don't write to yourself what I wrote to myself at 30 days. Don't say you will never experience pure joy again, because you will make that true. And that will not help anyone. That will not help you. That will not help your children. That doesn't honor your deceased husband or wife. Don't do that. Don't limit yourself. Our dead don't want us to be sad. Oh, Rob, all the time says to me, "All day ever wanted was for you to be happy. That's what Dave wanted. He wanted you and your children to be happy." He always says, "I am here to help make you happy." And my son at the Cape of Good Hope, where I took the picture, my son who told me 11 years ago never to get married. I'm sorry. Like lifting me up here is 21. He's way bigger than I am now, right? That little boy has grown up and he's more and more like his dad every day and lifting me up and saying, "Mom, we're going to go take that picture. And I want you to take it with Tom because dad would have wanted you to have him." I mean, that was one of the most important moments of my life. And it just happened. And I want more people who have lost spouses to have that with their children. And that's possible. Oh, 100% possible. Was that hard for your kids at all to speak about him without a hitch in their voice? Because I'm trying to think back of like, if my mom had really pushed it, we just didn't have a history of those kind of conversations. And I, for me, the pain was so. I don't know if I could have had them. The mom and me wants to go hug the little boy that you were, you know? I mean, look, I think at the beginning, I really tried to follow them. But I wanted to make it safe to talk about dad. We talked about dad. We went around every night at dinner and said our best and worst of the day. My son for a year said it. My boy worst is always the same. I got this advice from people whose parents hadn't talked. Talk about him. Was it hard for you to do that? I like talking about him early on. I went on a bike trip with couples and, you know, I was there myself and everyone went around and said how they met. It was like one of those how'd you meet your spouse? And it came to my turn and they skipped me. And I was like, ready to tell them how I met Dave. And I thought, no one's going to ask me this again this week. A distant friend of Dave turned 50. I got a long text and it said, it's my 50th birthday today. And I'm taking the day to think about the people who made a difference in my life. And Dave is one of them. I love that text. I don't want him to go away. And this part's important. I married someone who doesn't want him to go away. Like if you love me, you have to love Dave too. I sit here loving them both. And there's room in my heart for both. I want people to have permission, permission for joy, permission for love, not because they didn't love their spouse. But because when option A is unavailable, you might as well kick the shit out of option B. And, you know, resilience, it is what Adam told me. It's a muscle we build it. My mother-in-law standing over me. She lost a husband and a son. Rob is all she had left and me. But she lost two of the three people in her family. And she said, I did not die. I am going to live. That is what her husband would have wanted. And I know that's what her son would have wanted because he wanted that for her. And I want people to have permission to live. And to know that it's not just not honoring the deceased, but it is honoring their life. There's this beautiful concept I researched for I book a guy named Joe Casper lost a son. And he came up with this idea called co-destiny. What's co-destiny? It means that when you do things in memory of the person you lost, you are fulfilling their destiny. Like they're not alive to live anymore, but you can do things in their memory. It's a pu- And that makes them live in a way. Correct. When I tell stories about Dave, he's still alive. When people talk to people about the children they've lost, when people give you permission to joy, you keep that personal life. I've noticed that people do not say the names of their dad. Like when somebody says, I lost a son, I lost my husband, rarely. do they say I lost my dad Wyatt or I lost my brother Carter you just say I lost my brother and nine times out of ten no one ever responds by oh what was their name and I think there's something so sad in that that we don't say the names of our dead and I notice you do it's something I've been trying to do more often and just do it naturally my brother Carter died or my dad why it died whatever maybe but I like that idea of speaking the names of our dead I think one of the reasons people don't ask about Dave or your dad they think they're gonna upset you they think they're gonna remind you as if you're not thinking about as if you don't know as if you say or you said about Dave I'm like oh who's Dave like I know and so I actually I always now when someone dies I keep the dates of that person's birth and death in my calendar and I call or text that day to do that as well yeah but you have to have gone through this to do that I think before Dave died I didn't get this at all if someone had cancer I would say how are you feeling one time and I never mentioned it again because I don't want to remind them it's hard to remind someone they're going through chemo right now I am the person who says do you want to talk about this I'm here the other thing I think is so powerful and I learned is the word we I always say we're gonna get through this you're not alone like we are gonna do this is there something you've learned in your grief that would be helpful for others yes that grief can make your life better better and I want to be so clear I would never pick it I would never have chosen to lose Dave but I sit here 11 years later and I live a more meaningful life I am closer to the people who carried me through this and I experience joy in a different way from the very depths of our pain come what make us more human and more able to give and love and feel thank you so much thank you for having me you can read the full version of Cheryl's open letter now at cnn.com and we'll also link directly to it in our podcast show notes if you have thoughts you'd like to share about the conversation with Cheryl you can leave us a comment on our grief community page cnn.com/all there is you can also leave comments in our voicemail box or if there's something you've learned in grief that would be helpful for others we'd love to hear from you there as well leave us a voicemail at 404-827-1805 on Thursday October 8th I hope you join me at 9.15 p.m. from my streaming show all there is live you can watch new episodes live on cnn.com/all there is and it's free on our community page for a week after it airs live back episodes are available on cnn all access which you can sign up for at cnn.com/all access on Thursday October 15th we'll be sharing another new episode of the podcast that's it for us thanks so much for listening get ready for election night cnn is available to stream live now with an all access subscription plus get exclusive content and interactive q&a's with cnn's journalists subscribe now visit cnn.com/all access