“Powerlessness can be a powerful feeling …”
On Tuesday morning, fewer than 12 hours after Bills defensive back Damar Hamlin was carted off the field to the intensive care unit of a Cincinnati hospital to fight for his life, Jeremy White, the cohost of Buffalo’s morning sports talk radio show, approached the microphone and began to try to verbalize what an entire city could not.
White is on WGR550 every morning from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., and has been since the dawn of the Obama administration. He has helped steer some of the most difficult conversations the sports-minded city has had over the past two decades. He joked that callers have told him he’s like a therapist after disappointing Bills losses. But this week would require a different space in his brain. Like the time, at the beginning of the pandemic, a listener called in from his hospital bed, unsure whether he would live due to complications from the coronavirus, to warn people of the seriousness of the disease (that listener, White says, survived and thanked them recently for the catharsis of sharing his fear on the radio).
On Tuesday, White’s cohost, Howard Simon, talked about his inability to sleep without a notification that Hamlin had survived the night. White brought up a group text message among friends, where they wondered whether they just witnessed a death on television. This was not an argument about the Quarterback Mount Rushmore or Sean McDermott’s timeout usage.
“My main thought was: In moments of trauma, grief, anything, people react in different ways,” White said Thursday while letting his dog chase a ball at the local park, just after the world received a flurry of positive updates about Hamlin and his recovery. “Everyone processes it differently. There aren't any wrong ways to talk about it. It’s like we were all stepping into a room together. A waiting room. A virtual waiting room.”
What is unique about White, though, is his ability to have this conversation in the first place. He is well versed in the grieving process. The show Tuesday felt as though it was cradling listeners. It was the middle of a Venn diagram between traditional therapeutic “safe spaces” and the closeness you might feel talking to a best friend in the car about the legitimacy of a seventh playoff team. This is because of what White has endured, publicly—it has, in many ways, bolstered his credentials for discussing emotionally weighty topics. Over six agonizing days in 2019, White and his wife, Molly, lost their quadruplets following a premature birth. White had talked about the pregnancy on the show, and the couple had shared updates regularly through social media.
After two weeks, he was back. He says people told him how strong he was. He felt like he didn’t have another choice. Three months after that, White’s mother was killed in a car crash. He still struggles with the idea that she never got to meet her grandchildren (White and his wife now have twins). He says that is one piece of his past that he’ll carry with him daily.
His grieving process included sports (and, most notably, a heroic level of fundraising for the Perinatal Bereavement Network, to which you can donate here). He said that in the hospital, in a daze after he’d lost his children, he watched a hockey game. It wasn’t to ignore what happened, but to give his mind permission to be kept busy. The next weekend, he went to a Bills game. He didn’t want to lose that part of him.
And so, on Tuesday, he set out to have a show that allowed people to express whatever they wanted. Prayers. Questions about the game. Questions about the playoffs. Questions about anything. One caller, a Bills fan since 1988, cried when he mentioned the fact that Hamlin was dealing with a life-or-death situation. One caller was an emergency room physician who wanted to give thanks to the medical workers there. One wanted to know why the players weren’t removed from the field faster.
He recognized that, maybe, individual grief could be disguised as a question about whether the Bills and Bengals were going to actually play. Maybe some people just didn’t want to think about the hard stuff.
“People still care about the playoffs. They still care about the Super Bowl. And one of my main messages to people was, Don’t beat yourself up for thinking about that kind of stuff,” White says. “Anyone who has been through trauma, you learn that the rest of your life doesn’t stop entirely. You still feed the dog. You still go to the grocery store. You still might text someone about your fantasy football lineup.
“It doesn’t mean you’re disrespecting what’s happening. It means you’re living a normal life, but there’s also something over here you’re thinking about.”
White walked a dividing line that sank various sports personalities throughout the week. Some of whom immediately demanded a result to the game while unaware of Hamlin’s status. Others misguidedly blamed Bengals receiver Tee Higgins for Hamlin’s cardiac event. There was no shortage of objectively inappropriate, callous, self-serving and insensitive remarks made by those who revealed themselves as opportunists, who lacked sensitivity or who simply couldn’t grasp that the person lying on the ground was a human being.
But then there was White, who felt like the show should go on, because for him, it did, and it helped.
“No matter what you’re doing, when you see that you’re not alone, there’s some strength in that,” White says. “I’m feeling a certain way? I know I’m not alone in feeling this way. I can share my feelings. I can talk about it.”
