Sheryl Sandberg Was Terrified Her Kids ‘Would Never Be Happy Again’ After Her Husband’s Death

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Sheryl addresses how her children reacted to Dave’s death—and how challenging it was to support them through her own powerful grief. At his funeral, the children “got out of the car and fell to the ground, unable to take another step,” she says. “I lay on the grass, holding them as they wailed.” Sheryl says both she and the children struggled to cope. “Day after day, my kids’ cries and screams filled the air. In the moments when they weren’t crying, I watched them anxiously, waiting for the next instance they might need comfort,” she says. “My own cries and screams—mostly inside my head but some out loud—filled the rest of the available space.”

A few weeks after Dave’s death, Sheryl says she began talking with psychologist and friend Adam Grant. In her book, Sheryl says that she told Adam that “my greatest fear was that my kids would never be happy again,” and credits him with helping her move past her grief. “I thought resilience was the capacity to endure pain, so I asked Adam how I could figure out how much I had,” she says. “He explained that our amount of resilience isn’t fixed, so I should be asking instead how I could become resilient.”

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Now, she tells USA Today that she is impressed by her children’s compassion and perspective. “From the beginning they cared about other people,” she says. “My daughter went to bed the night she learned her father died saying, ‘I feel bad for Grandma Paula and Uncle Rob.’ She was 7.” She also shares a story about how her son’s basketball team recently lost a playoff game. “And so I looked at my son and said, ‘Are you OK?’” she says. “He goes, ‘Mom, this is 6th grade basketball. I’m fine.’ That’s perspective, and I wouldn’t wish it on him in a million years, but he has it.”

Sheryl points out that there’s “no one way” to grieve a loss, and shares that Adam Grant gave her this advice, “If I cannot let myself find some happiness, even in the very, very small ways, my kids were not going to recover. Because if I did not recover they were not going to recover.” She left with this important message: “Happiness is the small stuff. It’s how we spend our days.”

Sheryl’s new book is out now.