Do we still have to lean in if Dave Goldberg is dead?

After three days of silence on the cause of death for Dave Goldberg, the New York Times has changed their story in the span of seven hours, some mysterious source said collapsed while exercising. Then a leak to the Associated Press said head trauma. If we were in an Agatha Christie mystery, I’d say heart attack.

But we are in the real world, and I don’t believe any of it.

My uncle committed suicide. His son hid in the closet while my uncle shot himself in the head. His son saw everything.

I didn’t know this until 20 years later. Everyone in my family thought the uncle had a heart attack shoveling snow. Every time my dad went out to shovel snow, my mom would say, “Be careful! I don’t want you to have a heart attack.”

The first thing my brother did when he saw my post about Dave Goldberg killing himself was send a reminder of our uncle. We still can’t believe how long the family thought he died shoveling snow. Family secrets are powerful. And effective.

So it seems pretty easy to me for Dave’s family to tell everyone a lie.

A reporter from CNN called me this morning. He asked me what the motive would be for Sheryl to lie about the cause of death.

Are you kidding me? The fact that CNN can’t dream up a motive really blows my mind.

Sheryl has made her husband, Dave, the role model for the perfect husband. She has said many times that the most important factor in her success was the husband she chose. And as late a week ago, she was saying that men need to do more, they are not doing enough, they need to take more responsibility. And, again, she held up her husband as an example.

It’s hard to be put in the spotlight as the world’s best dad and world’s best husband. Dave had one of the hardest roles in public life to maintain. He was CEO of a company where the investors were dumping stock, and Sheryl made people believe Dave was perfect – a poster boy for the family guy.

So then, I would like to know why was he on vacation in Mexico without Sheryl and without the kids? What was it a vacation from? Who was he with?

Why was Sheryl in DC instead of going to get the body? Why was Sheryl in DC instead of home with her kids? Why does Dave take a vacation when Sheryl is scheduled to be gone?

I wouldn’t ask so many questions except that Sheryl keeps telling me to lean in, but she doesn’t tell me how she does it. I ended up spending my 401K on household help, scaling back my career, and taking my kids on business trips that were magical at first and a bore thereafter.

Sheryl tells me she can lean in because she has a husband who is perfect, but it’s hard to believe because in the time she’s been married to him, he’s gained a lot of weight. And we all know that gaining that much weight is a sign of serious problems.

She tells me she and her husband try to make sure one of them is home with the kids, but it’s not what we have seen in the last five days. She doesn’t tell us if she has nannies. She doesn’t tell us how often she is away from her kids.  All she tells us is that leaning in depends on her husband.

So can she lean in now? Can you lean in if you don’t have the perfect husband? What if it’s too late to get the perfect husband? She doesn’t address that, but maybe she will now. I have a feeling that the spokesperson for high-flying careers is going to get a lot more informative and helpful now that she’s a single mom. All the money in the world can’t buy a substitute for a parent showing up to kiss a skinned knee.

But first she needs to stop misleading us. It’s misleading to refuse to talk about how much household help she has. It’s misleading to not talk about what she gives up with her kids, since all decisions in life are about choosing what to give up. It’s misleading to tell us she has a perfect husband and not address the cause of his huge weight gain.

Most of all, it’s misleading to ignore pleas for the cause of death for three days and then come up with something that is pretty difficult to confirm. And I can tell you, coming from a family of people who are misleading, that it’s a way of life once you start.

That doesn’t justify waiting three days to announce cause of death, and it doesn’t justify the misinformation she’s been spreading the last three years to push her own agenda.

That said I’m not sure it matters anymore how Dave died. Maybe he did die of a heart attack. It’s a fine line between a heart attack and a suicide. Heart attack is purely a disease of lifestyle. It is preventable. So Dave Goldberg died from a being totally out of control in his life from stress, or he died from depression that got out of control. Either way, Sheryl and Dave had nowhere near the perfect marriage that we heard about nonstop from Sheryl.

What matters is that we might all get relief from Sheryl painting a picture of the perfect family, refusing to divulge pertinent information about how that family actually works, and shaming everyone who do not lean in the way she does.

Arianna Huffington is on a book tour right now telling women to forget about having it all and instead get some sleep. I have a feeling that Sheryl will be on a book tour in similar fashion. But, like Arianna, Sheryl will have to wait until her kids go to college, because taking care of kids is a lot of work.