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

When Sheryl Sandberg’s husband, Dave Goldberg, died suddenly in 2015 at 47, she believed she would not find love or “pure joy” again, but she has. She talks with Anderson about her experiences and about an open letter she has written to adult children who’ve lost a parent, asking them to “give permission and even encouragement” to their surviving parent to date and find love again if they want to. Read Sheryl Sandberg’s open letter and for more of “All There Is with Anderson Cooper” visit cnn.com/allthereis. Host: Anderson Cooper Showrunner: Haley Thomas Producers: Emily Williams and Kyra Dahring Video Editor: Eric Zembrzuski Technical Director: Dan Dzula Bookers: Kerry Rubin and Kari Pricher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Anderson Cooper?

  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 Sheryl 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, Sheryl 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.

• 1:15Anderson Cooper?

  Sheryl 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. Sheryl 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 replace tears and you can carry your parents' memory forward with love,

• 2:00Anderson Cooper?

  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 a new partner is 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 love, the emptiness of that chair 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.

• 2:43Anderson Cooper?

  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 Sheryl a couple of weeks ago in New York.

• 2:54Anderson Cooper?

  Thank you so much for doing this.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:10Anderson Cooper?

  Well, thank you so much.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  Grief is so lonely.

• 3:12Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah, it is.

• 3:13Speaker 02

  It's lonely.

• 3:13Anderson Cooper?

  Had you much experience with loss before your husband, Dave, died?

• 3:18Speaker 02

  None. 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.

• 3:29Anderson Cooper?

  What happened to Dave?

• 3:31Speaker 02

  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 Catan on 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. Then I go where everyone'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 I remember my sister-in-law screaming, "Where's the gym?" And we ran.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  And he was on the floor. And he was lying on the floor, now he's on an elliptical machine. There was blood on his, around his head. I mean, I screamed. His brother, Rob, was there. He screamed. People came. The ambulance came. And 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? 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. Marnie, my best friend, was there.

• 4:54Speaker 02

  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 was gone.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  In one second, that you're not prepared for and not even there for. Just everything changes. Absolutely, everything changes.

• 5:13Anderson Cooper?

  Your kids were not, were not there on the trip?

• 5:16Speaker 02

  I had a seven-year-old daughter and a 10-year-old son. They were at home. I got home fast. I flew home overnight. And you know, what are you going to say to a seven and a 10-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. And I called her. 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."

• 6:00Speaker 02

  Like, "I have life-shattering, earth-shattering, the world will never be the same news." But what you say is what 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. That seven and 10-year-old are 19 and 21. They are in college. And my daughter, for her senior class essay, she was asked to write an essay on something she's grateful for.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  And she wrote a paper she called "The Ode to Death." And she said it was the blessings of her dad's loss, 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.

• 7:02Anderson Cooper?

  And you feel that as well.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  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 like 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.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  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 kids' soccer fields, 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-in-law, Rob, described it as a boot on your chest or 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 died?

• 8:29Anderson Cooper?

  That the world was still spinning.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  But in those moments, knowing it can get better. And it does. It really does.

• 8:38Anderson Cooper?

  That's not a message, though, you would have believed in the first week.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:04Anderson Cooper?

  Post-traumatic growth?

• 9:06Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:20Anderson Cooper?

  How do you get there?

• 9:22Speaker 02

  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 are 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.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  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.

• 10:25Anderson Cooper?

  How do you help a 10-year-old and a 7-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 is 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.

• 11:04Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah, how to grieve.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:19Anderson Cooper?

  Wow.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  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 in. 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.

• 11:43Anderson Cooper?

  So you could talk about him with them? And could they talk about him with you?

• 11:48Speaker 02

  Oh, 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 up. 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.

• 12:11Anderson Cooper?

  C.S. 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 try, there appears on their faces neither grief, nor love, nor fear, nor pity, but the most fatal of all nonconductors, 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." And interestingly, later on, one of those boys wrote the foreword to a new edition of the book. And he gave his perspective of this moment and said that what C.S. 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,

• 12:56Anderson Cooper?

  they would break down crying and collapse, and that they knew he would as well. And they couldn't stand that embarrassment.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  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 had people video.

• 13:17Anderson Cooper?

  Oh, that's awesome.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  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, and my sons watched some too. And they are in touch with those people.

• 13:32Anderson Cooper?

  That's so cool.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Friends of Dad's. And I, I love that he's still part of our lives. And he deserves that.

• 13:43Anderson Cooper?

  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. It was the pain of seeing your children go through this.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  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 everyone would be, "Stop talking."

• 14:25Anderson Cooper?

  Nobody knows what to say.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  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 Shalom Shem. It is the mourning period for a spouse. Interestingly, Jewish mourning for a parent or child or sibling is 11 months. But for a spouse, 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?"

• 14:57Anderson Cooper?

  You prefer, "How are you today or right now?"

• 15:00Speaker 02

  "How are you today?" It acknowledges. And actually, then, people started asking me, "How are you today?" It worked.

• 15:06Anderson Cooper?

  You said that at the funeral, when you went to the gravesite with your kids, that they collapsed on the ground and that you sang to them.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I, 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 we got out of the car and my son collapsed, like, collapsed on the ground. And I couldn't get him up. And so I started singing. And the song I started singing is a Jewish song called "O Se Shalom", which I don't know if I've ever sang before in my life.

• 15:42Anderson Cooper?

  Really? It just came to you?

• 15:44Speaker 02

  And then other people started singing. And it turns out that those are lines from the Jewish prayer for mourning, Kaddish. 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."

• 16:00Anderson Cooper?

  Is it okay if I play a little bit of what you sang?

• 16:03Speaker 02

  [Singing] O se shalom dim romah.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  Tu y as se shalom alello. Ve'al kol israel. Ve'im ru, im ru, amen.

• 16:33Anderson Cooper?

  It's beautiful.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  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, "You okay?"

• 16:59Speaker 02

  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.

• 17:15Anderson Cooper?

  More of Sheryl Sandberg in a moment.

• 17:19Speaker 03

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• 18:01Anderson Cooper?

  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, comfort me because they know and speak the truth." Do you think that's true, that you'll never feel pure joy again?

• 18:20Speaker 02

  No.

• 18:20Anderson Cooper?

  Do you still believe that?

• 18:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 18:31Anderson Cooper?

  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.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  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. And... 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 to Dave, 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

• 19:26Speaker 02

  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?

• 19:33Anderson Cooper?

  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 going to come. So I did not allow myself joy. I just undercut it and I'm on to the next thing. And so it's not a recipe for anything good. But having children...

• 19:55Anderson Cooper?

  I have reason to be incredibly joyful. And they bring me nothing but extraordinary joy. And they're four and six, so they still like me and still want to 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.

• 20:12Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 20:57Speaker 02

  And so maybe, right here, right now. No, I'm serious, Anderson.

• 21:02Anderson Cooper?

  Maybe.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  Maybe, why not? And show your kids how precious each one is. You're still alive.

• 21:08Anderson Cooper?

  This is something you wrote in the 30-day window after Dave died. You said, "For me, the abiding lesson in 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."

• 21:25Speaker 02

  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 because I thought I was just not capable of doing anything. But I think one of the problems with death, whether it strikes 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 going to grieve, but over time, let yourself, let yourself feel some joy.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  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."

• 22:27Anderson Cooper?

  His brother introduced you to your husband?

• 22:31Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. 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 wrote back, I'm like, "Hello, on the email."

• 22:47Anderson Cooper?

  You just did.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  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 at her, I'm like, "How are you okay, Paula? How, 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."

• 23:30Speaker 02

  She said, "Mel, 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 going to love again. I'm going to dance at your wedding. I'm going to dance at your wedding."

• 23:47Anderson Cooper?

  That's quite a mother-in-law.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  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 going to be 60, I was going to be 70, I was going to be sitting there by myself. My kids were going to grow up, they were going to go to college. And I'd always thought Dave and I would sit there, and I was going to be alone.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  C.S. Lewis said something like, "I never knew death felt so much like fear." And there was like fear to this for me.

• 24:40Anderson Cooper?

  You talk about a picture that was very important to you, this picture at the

• 24:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:46Anderson Cooper?

  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?

• 24:53Speaker 02

  It was my favorite picture. Before he passed away, we're on our honeymoon. We looked 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 kind of like him as they grow older, you know? So it became more joyful. And then, and it's 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.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  And I don't know if I'd 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 almost bad."

• 26:22Speaker 02

  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 had showed him the picture and he knew we were going together. And I said, "I'm going to retake this picture with you. I'm not going to take it with 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, I still talk to Dave sometimes out loud.

• 26:49Anderson Cooper?

  You still do?

• 26:50Speaker 02

  Not, 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.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  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, he knows there's room for Dave, and he makes that room, and he wants pictures up in our house,

• 28:17Speaker 02

  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."

• 28:32Anderson Cooper?

  One of the things you wrote, you said that new love doesn't erase the old. It just proves that there's more room in our hearts than we know.

• 28:38Speaker 02

  This is what I want, 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.

• 28:48Anderson Cooper?

  The past and the present can be present

• 28:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:51Anderson Cooper?

  in the same space.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  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 then we're sins 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's deeper.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  But the second thing I always say is that, "And 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 talking about 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.

• 30:20Speaker 02

  And I said, "How are you?" He said, "I'm lonely. I'm alone all the time, and 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, her boyfriend moved into her apartment. Her son now won't step a 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.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  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.

• 31:27Anderson Cooper?

  To give back to the parent in a way.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  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.

• 31:39Anderson Cooper?

  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.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  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 gotta 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. And even encouragement. I mean, your story is remarkable because you actually encouraged your mom.

• 32:39Anderson Cooper?

  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 talk to me or just be there. And so my mom started dating, actually, Sidney Lumet, 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. And she was unaware that that was a wish of mine. And 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.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  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 partners, husbands, 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.

• 33:56Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah. What I like about the letter is that, I mean, it's an opportunity to start a conversation.

• 34:01Speaker 02

  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."

• 34:21Anderson Cooper?

  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." Or, "I can never do that to my kids. I can never do that." What would you say?

• 34:33Speaker 02

  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.

• 35:01Anderson Cooper?

  Our dead don't want us to be sad.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  Oh, Rob, all the time, says to me, "All Dave 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.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  Like, lifting me up, you know, he's 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 gonna go take that picture. And I want you to take it with Tom because Dad would have wanted you to have him." I mean,

• 35:49Speaker 02

  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.

• 36:00Anderson Cooper?

  And that's possible?

• 36:01Speaker 02

  100% possible.

• 36:04Anderson Cooper?

  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 for me, the pain was so...

• 36:28Anderson Cooper?

  I don't know if I could have had them.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  The mom in 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.

• 36:45Anderson Cooper?

  Best and worst of the day.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  My son, for a year, said it. My worst is always the same. I got this advice from people whose parents hadn't talked. Talk about him.

• 36:57Anderson Cooper?

  Was it hard for you to do that?

• 36:59Speaker 02

  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 gonna 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.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  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 isn't available, 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.

• 38:28Speaker 02

  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 my book. A guy named Joe Casper lost a son. And he came up with this idea called co-destiny.

• 39:00Anderson Cooper?

  What's co-destiny?

• 39:01Speaker 02

  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 beautiful...

• 39:12Anderson Cooper?

  And that makes them live in a way.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  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 person alive.

• 39:25Anderson Cooper?

  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 10, 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 dad. 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 Wyatt died, whatever it may be. But I like that idea of speaking the names of our dad.

• 40:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 40:09Anderson Cooper?

  As if you're not thinking about it.

• 40:10Speaker 02

  As if you don't know. As if you say, "Are you sad 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.

• 40:24Anderson Cooper?

  I try to do that as well.

• 40:25Speaker 02

  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 then 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're gonna do this."

• 40:56Anderson Cooper?

  Is there something you've learned in your grief that would be helpful for others?

• 41:01Speaker 02

  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.

• 41:42Anderson Cooper?

  Thank you so much.

• 41:44Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me.

• 41:47Anderson Cooper?

  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/allthereis. 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 PM for my streaming show, All There Is Live. You can watch new episodes live on CNN.com/allthereis. 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/allaccess.

• 42:30Anderson Cooper?

  On Thursday, October 15th, we'll be sharing another new episode of the podcast. That's it for us. Thanks so much for listening.