Sandberg and her husband, Dave Goldberg, were on vacation, celebrating a friend’s birthday in Mexico, when he died. They had been married for 11 years and had two young children.
At the time of his death, the kids were staying back with Sandberg’s parents in California. After Dave was missing for a few hours, Sandberg and two other people found him unresponsive. He couldn’t be resuscitated, and it was a 30-minute ambulance ride to the nearest hospital. Dave died, as it turns out, instantly from a massive cardiac event, but Sandberg wouldn’t learn that until later.
Sandberg traveled back to California to give her kids the bad news, which was intensely upsetting for everyone. The funeral was incredibly hard too. Sandberg’s grief was almost unbearable, but still, she was intrigued when Adam Grant, a family friend and a psychologist, told her that resilience wasn’t an innate fixed trait but something that people can cultivate in themselves.
