Life After Death
FOR DAVE GOLDBERG, MAY 1, 2015, WAS THE BEST DAY WITH the worst ending. The SurveyMonkey CEO was celebrating the 50th birthday of one of his closest buddies at a palm-fringed, $12,750-a-night villa in Punta Mita, a secluded Mexican resort favored by the Silicon Valley elite. The vacation had been full of what he loved: games with family and friends, walks and long talks by the pool. When he climbed on the fitness-center treadmill that Friday, nothing but blue sky appeared ahead: his company was doing well, his children were healthy, and he was as in love as ever with his superwoman wife Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO and the author of Lean In. Then his heart gave out.
Goldberg—Goldie to his friends—was only 47 when his younger brother Rob, Rob’s wife and Sandberg found him lying in a halo of blood, his skin blue. “I started doing CPR,” says Rob. “I remember not being sure if I could feel a pulse or if it was really my own heart pounding.” Goldberg was rushed to San Javier Hospital, a dimly lit medical center. Sandberg and one of her best friends, Marne Levine, sat on the linoleum floor waiting for a doctor to give them the news they didn’t want.
In short order—though she says it felt agonizingly slow—Sandberg, the complex-problem solver, the micromanager, the person with an almost freakish understanding of how to arrive at the best possible results, was thrust against something unfamiliar: an outcome she couldn’t change. “The wails of her crying in that hospital were unlike anything that I’d ever heard in my life,” says Phil Deutch, Levine’s husband and the person whose birthday they were celebrating. “It was an awful, awful scene.”
As they were leaving Goldberg’s body for
