This article by Michael Thallium was originally published in Spanish on the magazine Numinis.
It was February 9, 2026, when I saw him for the first time. I had him—if one can ever “have” something like that—on my mobile phone screen, in one of those short videos you swipe past quickly with your thumb, aimlessly. I stopped—that was the real slip-up—, left my thumb hanging in the air, and there I saw him. He was sitting on a chair, holding the electric guitar flat on his lap. With his left hand, he ran up and down the neck as if it were a keyboard; with the pick in his right hand, he plucked the strings. And then a youthful, fervent, and vigorous sound emerged. He was accompanied by another extraordinary guitarist, Stevie, whom I had heard more than half a lifetime ago. The sound immediately captivated me, his way of playing. There was something fascinating and special about him that hooked me and which I could not decipher, but, above all, I was amazed not to know who this blond-haired boy was or to have seen or heard him ever before. How was that possible?
The two guitarists were playing a song, a mixture of blues and rock, that Look at Little Sister that Hank Ballard wrote without much fanfare in the late 1950s. There they were: two virtuosos, hand in hand, although I only knew one of them. Suddenly the young man with the blond hair gets up from the chair and begins to jump, punching the air with his head, frantically, to the rhythm of the music and a powerful melody—a fiery and bold guitar solo—that flows from the strings his fingers press and the plectrum plucks with energetic precision. He must be a little over twenty years old; younger, certainly, than Stevie, the other accompanying guitarist. Both were unaware in that moment of artistic inspiration that one of them would die in a helicopter crash barely three years later and that the other still had twenty more years of life until cancer took him. In retrospect, two very short lives: 35 and 41 years.
The question returns. How is it possible that I didn’t know him? And then the paradox: seeing him and getting to know him in a video of a performance from almost forty years ago when he has been gone from life for eighteen years already. An unknown death that is now evident with nostalgia upon seeing those images. And then having to settle for conjecturing a life from the probably inexact snippets that remain of it. Jeff was a special man, that is for sure, and with a great sense of humor, judging by what those who knew him say.
A few months after birth, they discovered something strange about his eyes. There was no choice but to deprive him of light forever and scoop out his eye sockets, which from then on would house the different ocular prostheses that concealed his blindness until death came for him. It was a distress for his adoptive parents, who always loved and supported him. Mutual love and a lot of respect. “Don’t guide me!”, he used to tell his father. He soon started playing the guitar they gave him as a gift. And he did it in that peculiar way, with the guitar lying on his thighs and his left hand fretting the strings as if they were piano keys. Then he formed a music band and then another… and to say forming a band is to say making friends, because friends were the musicians who accompanied him. Famous guitarists like Albert King and B.B. King soon noticed the boy.
He traveled the world playing the guitar, making music. With what he earned, he promoted research to find a cure for retinoblastoma so that other children would not run his same fate. And then Jeff also took up the trumpet and got married and had a daughter and got divorced and got married again and was made an honorary doctor at a university and had a son… And then Jeff’s life was extinguished by the silent cancer that had accompanied him since the cradle. And later they named a park after him and granted him the honors of posthumous fame that barely sweeps away the dust of oblivion that the years accumulate in people’s memory.
Now I do nothing but watch that video over and over again that revealed his existence to me and brought me a life to discover. Not that of a man with a prodigious talent who received applause, but that of Jeff Healey, the human being who knew how to find the warmth of others to go very far. That is one of life’s great mysteries: being able to deploy all the potential one carries within. Behind that prodigious deployment there are people, there are lives… there is love.
Over in Ontario, a tombstone in a cemetery remembers that Jeff was a man of faith in God, the beloved husband of Christie, the dear father of Rachel and Derek. What became of their lives and the lives of all the people who knew him?
In a park in Toronto, sparrows peck at the grass while children play at making music. They probably ignore it, but there Jeff Healey left the rumor of his steps on Earth.
Michael Thallium
