- Thank you, Marie.

And thank you esteemed members of the faculty,

proud parents, devoted friends, squirming siblings,

congratulations to all of you.

But especially, congratulations to the magnificent

Berkeley Class of 2016.

(woman screams)

(audience applause)

It's my privilege to be here at Berkeley,

which has produced so many Nobel Prize winners,

Turing Award winners, astronauts, members of Congress,

Olympic gold medalists, and that's just the women.

(audience cheers)

Berkeley has always been ahead of the times.

As Chancellor Dirks said, in the 1960's,

you led the free speech movement.

Back then, people used to say with all the hair,

"How do we even tell the men from the women?"

Today we know the answer. Man buns.

(audience laughs)

Early on, Berkeley opened its doors

to the entire population.

When this campus opened in 1873,

you had 167 men and 222 women.

It took my alma mater another 90 years to give a

single degree to a single woman.

One of the women who came here in

search of opportunity was Roselyn Nuss.

Ros grew up scrubbing floors in the

Berkling boarding house where she lived.

In high school, her parents pulled her

out of school to help support the family.

And it was a local teacher who talked her parents

into putting her back into school.

In 1973, she sat where you sit today,

and she became a Berkeley graduate.

Ros was my grandmother.

(audience cheers)

She is one of the major sources of inspiration in my life.

I was born on her birthday.

And I am so grateful to Berkeley

for recognizing her potential.

And I want to say a special congratulations

to the many who today become the first

in your families to graduate from college.

What a remarkable achievement.

(audience cheers)

Today is a day of celebration.

A day to celebrate all the hard work

that got you to this moment.

Today is a day of thanks.

A day to thank all the people who helped you get here.

The people who taught you and nurtured you,

cheered you on, and dried your tears.

Or at least didn't write on you with a sharpie

when you fell asleep at a party.

(audience chuckles)

Today is a day of reflection

because today marks the end of one era of your life

and the beginning of something new.

A commencement address is meant to be

a dance between youth and wisdom.

You provide the youth.

Someone comes up here to be the voice of wisdom.

That's supposed to be me.

I tell you all the things I've learned in life,

you throw your cap in the air,

you let your family take a million photos,

and hopefully post them on Instagram,

and then we all go home happy.

Today's gonna be a bit different.

We'll still do the caps

and you still have to do the photos,

but I'm not gonna tell you today what I learned in life.

Today I'm going to try to tell you what I learned in death.

I've not spoken about this publicly before, and it's hard,

but I promise not to blow my nose

on this beautiful Berkeley robes.

One year and 13 days ago, I lost my husband, Dave.

His death was sudden and unexpected.

We were in Mexico celebrating a friends 50th birthday party.

I took a nap. He went to workout.

What followed was the unthinkable.

I walked into a gym to find him lying on the floor.

I flew home to tell my children that their father was gone.

I watched his casket being lowered into the ground.

For many months afterward, and at many times since,

I was swallowed in the deep fog of grief,

what I think of as the void.

An emptiness that fills your heart and your lungs,

constricts your ability to think or even to breathe.

Dave's death changed me in very profound ways.

I learned about the depths of sadness

and the brutality of loss.

But I also learned that when life sucks you under,

you can kick against the bottom,

find the surface, and breathe again.

(audience applause)

I learned that in the face of the void,

or in the face of any challenge,

you can choose joy and meaning.

I'm...

(audience cheers)

I'm sharing this with you today,

in the hopes that on this day in your lives,

with all the momentum and the joy,

you can learn in life the lessons I only learned in death.

Lessons about hope, about strength,

and about the light within us that will not be extinguished.

(audience applause)

Everyone who's made it through Cal

has already experienced some disappointment.

You wanted an A, but you got a B.

Let's be honest, you got an A minus but you're still mad.

(sparse laughter)

You applied for an internship at Facebook,

but you only got one at Google.

(audience laughs)

She was clearly the love of your life,

but then she swiped left.

(audience laughs)

Game of Thrones, the show, has diverged

way too much from the books,

and you're mad because you read 4,352 pages.

(sparse cheers)

You will almost certain face more and deeper adversity.

There's loss of opportunity, the job that doesn't work out,

the illness or crime which changes everything in an instant.

There's loss of dignity.

The sharp sting of prejudice when it happens.

There's loss of love.

The broken relationships that can't be repaired.

And sometimes, there's loss of life itself.

Many of you have already experienced

the kind of tragedy and hardship

that leaves an indelible mark.

Last year Radhika, winner of the University Medal,

spoke so beautifully about the sudden loss of her mother.

The question is not if some

of these things will happen to you.

They will.

What I want to talk about today

is what you do next.

About the things you can do to overcome adversity

no matter when it hits you or how it hits.

The easy days ahead of you will be easy.

It is the hard days, the days that challenge you

to your very core, that will determine who you are.

You will be defined, not just by what you achieve,

but by how you survive.

(audience applause)

A few weeks after Dave died,

I was talking to my friend Phil

about a father-son activity Dave would not be here to do.

We came in with a plan to fill in for Dave,

but I cried to Phil.

I said, "I want Dave."

Phil put his arm around me and said, "Option A is not

available, so let's just kick the shit out of option B."

(audience cheers)

We all, at some point, live some form of option B.

The question is, what do we do next?

As a representative of Silicon Valley,

I'm pleased to tell you that there's data we can learn from.

After spending decades studying how people

deal with setbacks, psychologist Martin Seligman

found that there are three keys,

personalization, pervasiveness, and permanence,

that are critical to how we bounce back from hardship.

The seeds of resilience are planted in the way

we process the negative events of our lives.

The first P is personalization,

the belief that we are at fault.

This is different from taking responsibility,

which you should always do.

This is the lesson that not everything that happens to us,

happens because of us.

When Dave died, I had a very common reaction,

which is to blame myself.

He died in seconds from a cardiac arrhythmia.

I pored over his medical records asking

what I could've or should've done.

It wasn't until I learned about the three P's

that I accepted that I could not have prevented his death.

His doctor's had not diagnosed his coronary artery disease.

I was an economics major. How could I?

Studies show that getting past personalization

can make us stronger.

Teachers who have students who fail who believe

they can do better, revisit their methods

and have future classes that excel.

College swimmers who underperform in a race,

but believe they can do better, do.

Not taking failures personally,

allows us to recover, and even to thrive.

The second P is pervasiveness,

the belief that an event will effect all areas of your life.

You know that song Everything is Awesome?

This is the flip, Everything is Awful.

There's nowhere to hide from the all consuming sadness.

The child psychologist that I spoke to encouraged me

to get my children back to their routine

as quickly as possible.

So ten days after Dave died, my kids went back to school

and I went back to work.

I remember sitting in my first

Facebook meeting in a total haze,

thinking what is everyone talking about

and how could this possibly matter.

And then, I got drawn into the conversation

and for a second, the briefest of all seconds,

I forgot about death.

That second helped me see that there were other things

in my life that were not awful.

My children and I were healthy.

My friends and family, some of whom are with me today,

were carrying us, quite literally.

The loss of a partner often has severe,

negative financial consequences, especially for women.

So many single mothers and fathers

struggle to make ends meet, and don't get

the time off they need to care for their families.

I had financial security, the ability to

take the time off I needed, and not just a job I loved,

but one where I was encouraged to spend all day on Facebook.

(audience laughs)

Gradually, my children started sleeping through the night,

crying less, and playing more.

The third P is permanence,

the belief that the sorrow will last forever.

This was the hardest by me for far because for so long

it felt like the overwhelming grief would never leave.

We often project our current feelings out indefinitely.

We're anxious, and then we're anxious that we're anxious.

We're sad, and then we're sad that we're sad.

Instead, we should accept our feelings

but know that they won't last forever.

My Rabbi of all people actually told me,

and this is a quote, that I should "lean into the suck."

Not what I meant when I said, "Lean in."

None of you need me to explain the fourth P,

which is of course pizza from Cheese Board.

(sparse cheers)

But I wish I had known about the three P's

where I was your age, because there are

so many times they would have helped me.

Day one of my first job out of college,

my new boss figured out that

I did not know how to enter data into Lotus 1-2-3.

That's a spreadsheet. Ask your parents later.

(audience chuckles)

His mouth dropped open, and he said in front of everyone,