Bridget Hillsberg had an uneasy feeling from the moment she arrived at the Nobu Hotel Los Cabos in Mexico.
She and her husband, Dave, had planned the trip for months – a joyous getaway with 28 close friends and relatives to celebrate Hillsberg’s 40th birthday.
The sun was shining, the Pacific sparkled and, though the Japanese-inspired venue had not been the couple’s first choice, it was undeniably luxurious.
They had originally booked the Rancho Pescadero, a five-star resort an hour’s drive away in Todos Santos that had been scheduled to reopen a week earlier after a costly revamp.
But on the morning of November 10, 2022 – a day before the party – the hotel’s manager rang Dave to apologize that a code violation had caused unforeseen delays.
With the adults-only hideaway under orders by authorities to remain closed until a leak in the sewage system was fixed, the Hillsbergs scrambled to find rooms elsewhere for 30 people.
‘I’d been crying a lot because of the stress and worry but Dave took me aside,’ Hillsberg, a speech pathologist, told the Daily Mail.
‘He said: “Honey, you’re acting as if somebody has died. We’ve come all this way so let’s make the best of it and have a great vacation.”’
Dave and Bridget Hillsberg with their son, Ben, and daughter, Stella
The Hillsbergs celebrated Bridget’s 40th birthday at a luxury hotel in Mexico with 28 of their closest friends
Hillsberg shudders at the recollection of his choice of words. Within 24 hours, Dave was found floating face down in one of the hotel’s pools in just four feet of water.
He died of a little-known condition called shallow water blackout – also called hypoxic blackout – after losing consciousness under the surface.
The father-of-two had been amusing their friends by having them time how long he could hold his breath underwater.
It was one of those apparently harmless games that people, particularly children, play all the time. But what seemed like a spot of fun cost Dave his life.
Bridget and Dave, a financier, had known each other since college in the 2000s but their romance kindled only a decade ago. Their son, Ben, was born soon afterwards in 2016 and a daughter, Stella, followed two years later.
With a shared passion for hiking, swimming, diving and skiing, they embarked on many adventures – sometimes as a family or on their own while the children were cared for by either set of grandparents at their home in Hermosa Beach, California.
Having also been on vacation with adult relatives and friends to exotic places such as Belize and Hawaii, it seemed natural to arrange a rendezvous in Mexico to mark Hillsberg’s milestone.
They had settled on Baja California after visiting Cabos, a favorite destination, at least three times previously.
The date of Hillsberg’s birthday was October 4 but the group waited to celebrate over the long Veteran’s Day weekend so that they had extra time away.
She flew with Dave from Los Angeles to stay in a hotel in San Jose del Cabo several days earlier, wanting to finalize preparations for the party and make gift bags to welcome their guests to Rancho Pescadero.
What was to become one of her happiest memories occurred while there as Dave filmed Hillsberg dancing in the street, twirling in a sundress without a care in the world.
‘I had a wonderful husband, two beautiful children and the perfect life,’ she said. ‘And I felt blessed and incredibly excited that all these people we loved were coming to my birthday.’
As relieved as the Hillsbergs were to have found alternative accommodation at the last minute, the Nobu’s Zen-like aesthetics did little to quell their sense of foreboding that began at check-in.
‘Dave looked at me and said: “I just don’t have a good feeling about this place.”
‘I said, “Me neither.” Something felt off from the moment we walked in there. It was just very strange.’
Dave Hillsberg posing on a beach. ‘I had a wonderful husband, two beautiful children and the perfect life,’ his wife said
The couple shared a passion for the outdoors and enjoyed everything from hiking, swimming and diving to skiing
The Hillsberg family photographed near their home in Hermosa Beach, California
That evening, over sushi in the hotel restaurant with some of the friends who had arrived, Hillsberg struggled to shake the feeling and ran back to her room close to tears.
‘“I just hate it here,”’ she responded when her sister asked what was wrong. ‘I was flustered, which was out of character.’
Later, she couldn’t stop crying after retiring for the night with Dave. She had never considered herself to be particularly needy but, as they lay in bed, she pleaded with him not to leave her.
‘I was begging over and over again,’ she recalled. ‘And he said: “Why would you even say something like that? You know that I am never going to leave you.’”
Dave mentioned the strange episode to their friends at breakfast, jokingly saying that her heartfelt pleas had kept him awake.
‘After he died, everyone was saying: “What the heck was going on there?”’
The day wound up being a relaxing one and the Hillsbergs hung out with their friends at the pool, hopping in and out of the hot tub in its center until the mid afternoon.
Around 3pm, Hillsberg jumped into the pool to chat to Dave who was splashing around. She hugged him tightly. ‘I love you so much,’ she told him. He said the same thing back. Then he kissed her and said: ‘You’re the love of my life.’
‘Those were the last words he ever said to me,’ Hillsberg said. ‘It was almost as if I got a last goodbye without knowing it.’
One hour later, after briefly leaving the pool area to discuss party arrangements with staff, she returned but couldn’t find Dave.
She stopped by the sun loungers to ask their friends in the hot tub where he was. ‘He’s doing his breath holding thing right there,’ someone said.
Hillsberg laughed to herself. One of Dave’s favorite pastimes was to sit cross-legged at the bottom of a swimming pool for as long as he could.
‘He’d done it since he was a kid,’ she said. ‘He enjoyed the attention because people would talk about how long he could stay underwater compared to them.’
Hillsberg scanned the pool and saw Dave hovering near the water’s surface. ‘I looked at his body posture and it was very much like the dead man’s float,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t his usual yogi pose at the bottom and all I could say was: “Get him out!”’
The friends sprang out of the hot tub and dragged Dave to the side of the pool. ‘They pulled him out, and he was just blue,’ Hillsberg recalled. ‘I was thinking: “No way – all he does is swim. He’s a fish. He’s a diver. He’s just joking.”’
People, including two doctors who rushed over after hearing the commotion, began CPR. Rooted to the spot as she watched the resuscitation attempts, Hillsberg willed Dave to spit up the water and breathe.
‘It was November, and the sun was setting rather early,’ Hillsberg said. ‘It must have been around 5pm when I saw the dusk forming and screamed: “It’s taking too long!”
‘I thought: “This is not good. We are losing him fast.”’
The Hillsbergs on their wedding day. They had known each other since college in the early 2000s but their romance kindled a decade and a half later
Dave’s last words to his wife were, ‘You are the love of my life’
Paramedics arrived and Dave was rushed to the hospital. Hillsberg was ushered into a friend’s SUV to follow the ambulance but was too hysterical to leave the hotel. She was taken by wheelchair to her room – ‘the death chamber’ – where she and her sister waited in despair.
Hillsberg’s brother-in-law called two hours later. Dave was dead. ‘I thought: “Oh, my God. My husband just died at my freaking birthday party. How am I going to go home and tell my two kids that this happened?”’
She was heavily sedated but still couldn’t calm the chaotic thoughts. ‘I remember thinking: “Why did I tell him not to leave me last night? What led us to this hell?”’
A friend stayed in Mexico while the US Consulate helped repatriate Dave’s body to the US. It was left to Hillsberg, who returned to California, to tell Ben and Stella that their father was gone.
‘I said, “Daddy went to heaven at Mommy’s birthday party,”’ she said. ‘“I’m so sorry but Daddy’s not coming back.”’
The next few weeks passed in a haze but Hillsberg felt as though her husband was watching over his family.
November 11 is a significant date in numerology, often referred to as the ‘11/11 portal’ or a ‘master number’, and Hillsberg explained that those dying on that day – as Dave did – are deemed to be an ‘angel on earth’.
She began to see the number again and again. Moments before the start of Dave’s celebration of life — which had been arranged in advance of his body being formally released from Mexico — Hillsberg’s brother-in-law received a text message at 11.11am. It said that, by coincidence, his coffin had just landed at LAX.
In the years since, Hillsberg has campaigned to create a legacy for Dave by raising awareness of the condition that killed him.
Hillsberg with her children, now nine and six, wearing a baseball cap with the numerals 1111 which are so meaningful to them after Dave’s death
According to the autopsy, he had suffered hypoxic blackout caused from excessive breath-holding underwater. It had led to increased levels of carbon monoxide and lack of oxygen to his brain, triggering unconsciousness and death.
On her Instagram page, TheGriefBridge, Hillsberg shares some safety guidelines, advising against people playing breath-holding games and highlighting the dangers of hyperventilating beforehand, ignoring the urge to breathe and swimming alone.
‘I don’t want Dave to have died in vain,’ she said.
Ben and Stella have been ‘resilient’ in coping with the loss of their father, helped by Hillsberg’s new partner, Nate, 50, a father-of-three and widower she met at a bereavement counseling group in 2023.
‘We’re rebuilding our lives because there has to be life after death,’ she said. ‘But we’ll never forget the people we lost.’
