Facebook COO to UC Berkeley grads: 'Live as if you had eleven days left'

BERKELEY, Calif., May 15 (UPI) -- Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg spoke about her husband's death publicly for the first time during a commencement speech Saturday, encouraging graduates to "live as if you had eleven days left."

Sandberg spoke of resilience and loss as she addressed the graduating class of 2016 at the University of California at Berkeley on Saturday. Her comments came a little more than a year after her husband, Dave Goldberg, died suddenly at 47.

"I have never spoken publicly about this before. It's hard," she said, according to Business Insider.

She went on to encourage the group of graduates to "live as if you had eleven days left" and remain resilient in the face of their own hard times as she learned to do upon returning to work at Facebook after her husband's death.

"Build resilience in yourselves. When tragedy or disappointment strike, know that you have the ability to get through absolutely anything. I promise you do," she said.

Bloomberg reports that resilience has been mentioned as a theme for Sandberg's second book, a follow up to 2013's "Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead," which she alluded to in her speech.

"My rabbi told me that time would heal but for now I should 'lean in to the suck.' It was good advice, but not really what I meant by 'lean in,'" she said.

Those close to Sandberg reportedly said she had informally discussed a book about the theme of resilience among friends and the speech represented her first attempt to publicly explore the subjects she would cover in the book.

"I'm sharing this with you today in the hopes that on this day in your life, with all the momentum and joy, you can learn the lessons that I only learned in death," Sandberg told the crowd.