On Talking to God, My Dead Cat, and Damar Hamlin
God sounded quite normal, like a person one might meet on the street.
On January 2, 2023, The Cincinnati Bengals hosted The Buffalo Bills for a Week 17 Monday Night Football Game. At 8:56 pm, Bills Safety Damar Hamlin collapsed after tackling Bengals Wide Receiver Tee Higgins. In a twist of fate, Damar Hamlin’s heart was stopped, and he collapsed onto the ground as millions of Americans watched.
Rescue teams were immediately deployed and began to perform CPR on Hamlin as well as starting AED. CPR was administered on the field for ten minutes before Damar was placed on a stretcher and taken by ambulance to the University of Cincinnati Medical Center.
I was one of the millions of Americans who watched that night as Damar Hamlin received lifesaving treatment. As the minutes went by, I felt myself slipping into despair. I felt my reality coming apart at the seams. Watching a could-be national tragedy televised caused the right mix of stress and disassociation needed for psychosis.
I went to bed that night feeling like a deflated balloon. Damar had been sent to the hospital and I was awake, obsessed with checking his status on Twitter. I was reading the outpouring of love and support from all over the world and especially from all over the NFL. I was reading rumor after rumor, checking the Bills' Instagram for updates, and waiting for Josh Allen or Joe Burrow to make a public statement.
Late into the night, a voice spoke to me. It was God. He didn’t introduce himself as God, but I inherently knew he was God. God sounded quite normal, like a person one might meet on the street. God gave me simple instructions: “If you pray to Weezy, you will heal Damar.”
Now let’s back it up a bit here. Who is Weezy?
Weezy is my dead cat. He died about a month before Damar Hamlin went down on the field. When he died, he was cremated. His ashes were put into a beautiful wooden urn with his name engraved on it. I also have a clay pawprint of his kept at my bedside each night.
After Weezy died, I took some of his earthly possessions, such as his collars and fur clippings, his urn, and a framed photo of him, and made a small memory shelf with his things. Weezy was my soul animal. It only felt right to memorialize him in this way.
In the late hours of January 2, 2023, when God came to me and told me that I, alone, could heal Damar Hamlin by praying to Weezy, I did not question it. It was God, after all. I’m not a particularly religious person, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that I followed God’s orders. There was no specific threat or malice behind God’s words, but praying mattered.
So I prayed. Not so much to Weezy, but with Weezy. I prayed over and over and over again. I kept hoping I was praying hard enough. I held Weezy’s clay pawprint in between my hands and prayed for Damar Hamlin’s recovery.
You may have already asked yourself why I would tell such a potentially embarrassing or scary story. You may wonder how my mind could connect Damar Hamlin to my dead cat and what role God plays in all of this. You might also question my reliability as a narrator.
To answer your first question: I tell this story to help break the stigma surrounding psychosis and psychotic disorders. I live with schizoaffective disorder and experience psychosis as a symptom of that. At times, the perfect storm of events- the loss of my cat, the televised near-death experience of a young man, and a common symptom of psychosis (hearing God)- can all come together to create a split in reality.
To answer your second question: The psychotic mind is a fascinating thing. One of the most common symptoms of psychosis is loose associations. It is quite common for the psychotic mind to find relevance in seemingly irrelevant subject matter. Additionally, a symptom of many psychotic disorders (schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, etc.) is called hyperreligiosity. This is a preoccupation with religion or the occult. Another common symptom is seeing, hearing, or believing you are God.
To answer your third question: I can’t answer that for you. I can try to defend myself with my credentials and life story, but in the end, that would be contributing to stigma rather than breaking it. You must decide how you feel about this glimpse into a reconstructed reality. Psychosis is not an easy concept for the layman. If you have never experienced an alternate reality, you might not understand its twists and turns. I can only give you a road map.
In the end, Damar Hamlin fully recovered and was seen on the field again in late 2023. I highly doubt this had anything to do with my prayers. God was pretty lackadaisical about the whole thing anyway.
