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Sandberg gets personal in note on mourning husband

Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Facebook, arrives with her husband David Goldberg, CEO of SurveyMonkey, for the first day of the Allen and Co. media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho in this July 9, 2014, file photo. 

PHOTO: REUTERS

JUN 4, 20159:30 AM

[LOS ANGELES] Facebook number-two Sheryl Sandberg, whose husband died suddenly last month, said Wednesday in an emotional post that in mourning she had become sadder, and wiser.

"I have lived thirty years in these thirty days. I am thirty years sadder. I feel like I am thirty years wiser," she wrote on Facebook.

It was a tragic blow for one of America's best known business executives, famous for her efforts to encourage women's empowerment.

David Goldberg, 47, was the chief executive of online polling firm SurveyMonkey. He died suddenly after falling on a treadmill and striking his head at an upscale resort in Mexico.

"I have gained a more profound understanding of what it is to be a mother," she writes, "both through the depth of the agony I feel when my children scream and cry and from the connection my mother has to my pain." Her own mother, Sandberg added, "has explained to me that the anguish I am feeling is both my own and my children's, and I understood that she was right as I saw the pain in her own eyes." Her mother, she said, since the death has been "holding me each night until I cry myself to sleep."

AFP