��ѿ��ý

Available for over a year

This week Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer at Facebook, wrote a moving and inspiring post on Facebook about the process of mourning her husband, Dave Goldberg, who died suddenly last month. She was marking the end of 30 days of mourning - a period she was observing as a Jew, known as sheloshim. “I think when tragedy occurs,” she says, “it presents a choice. You can give in to the void ... Or you can try to find meaning. I have spent many of my moments lost in that void. But when I can, I want to choose life and meaning.” Part of that choice, she says, is to share her own experience, so that others might gain support or help in the process. And her willingness to do so has sparked a viral conversation about grief - which is so often taboo - with hundreds of thousands of people commenting positively or sharing her post on social media. “Having lost my sweetheart one year ago I was still stuck,” wrote one person, who notes that Sandberg’s article has helped them to move on. Much of what she shares involves her own personal response to grief. “I have learned gratitude,” she says, for example. “Real gratitude for the things I took for granted before—like life. As heartbroken as I am, I look at my children each day and rejoice that they are alive. I appreciate every smile, every hug.” “I have [also] learned how much I need help, and how much help I need.” But she does issue a warning to those of us who would like to offer such help: “Real empathy,” she says, “is sometimes not insisting that it will be okay but acknowledging that it is not.” Yesterday I met a man who recently lost his son. As, we chatted, tears flowed. He was in a place of much pain, and as a Christian, he was quite understandably questioning much of what he had previously held to be true. Well meaning people around him, like Job’s comforters, had been trying to help him, he said ... by trying to fix him ... which really had not helped at all. (Religion doesn’t provide all the right, fix-it, answers, of course; a much neglected truth of Christianity is that brokenness is its crux ... so I think it’s OK for beliefs to be broken open, too.) “The most helpful thing anyone has done so far,” he shared, “is to sit with me without trying to tell me anything.” And he smiled, as he described this as “the gift of presence”. Something any of us can offer, of course, without condition. In the meantime, we may not have an alternative to sheloshim in our mainstream culture, but one thing Sheryl Sandberg gives us back so graciously, from that space which opened for her, is that it can at least be possible for us ... to try ... to choose life, and meaning, from within the void.