Blind fan Lisa Hart credits Beres Hammond’s music for coma recovery

At the Jammins Events-produced Reggae In Action concert in Newark, New Jersey, this past Saturday, Lisa Hart, who is legally blind, finally got to do something she'd been dreaming about for years — she stood in front of, touched and hugged her hero, Beres Hammond, the man whose voice she believes saved her life.

In the run-up to Lisa's exclusive meeting with Beres, her cousin, Benji — guitarist for the Ruff Kut Crew — walked Caribbean National Weekly through the whole journey: how a devoted fan's brush with death became bound up with the man whose music once played on repeat beside her hospital bed.

As Benji tells it, Lisa had a brain tumor and needed brain surgery twice.

"She actually lost her vision from those surgeries," Benji shared. Worse, "the surgery left her in a coma," and by his account, doctors weren't sure whether she'd come out of it at all.

"She was on machines, on a drip...her life hanging in the balance," he said.

Benji recalls that it was Lisa's daughter who told hospital staff that her mother was a huge fan of Beres Hammond.

"She would play Beres' music in the house every day," Benji recalled.

The staff put Beres' music into the room's system, and from then on, he says, Beres was "on repeat" for her, day after day.

Then, Benji says, "When she woke up she heard the music but she couldn't speak."

The coma and the surgeries had taken her voice along with her sight, and by his telling, "She had to learn to speak all over again."

It was that same music, he says, that helped her start forming words again, humming and singing the songs until language came back to her. "Her brain is back," he says simply. Her sight is the only thing that never returned.

Benji explains that he didn't actually learn Lisa's full story until about eight months ago — he'd been traveling with the Ruff Kut band when it all happened and only heard about the surgery afterward. When he found out, he told Lisa that he and Beres were friends and went back more than 35 years. She started crying on the spot, he recalls.

Not long after that conversation, Beres had a show in New York, and Lisa left the house to go see it. But by Benji's account, she never got the chance to actually meet him that night. So when Beres booked a show at the Prudential Center in her own city of Newark, New Jersey, Benji says she was "on top of the world."

He'd already told Beres the story himself.

"I told Beres about this maybe 5 or 6 months ago," he shared, so the two of them knew what this moment meant before it happened. As Benji describes it, he ducked backstage right before Beres came out of his dressing room to tell him she was there, waiting in a chair to meet him.

And then it happened.

"When I said, 'Lisa, Beres is touching you,' her whole expression just lightened up and changed like the sun just came out in the morning. And that means the world to her," he said.

To hear Benji explain it, this wasn't a simple meet-and-greet. It was, in his words, a piece of her life story — "that's why she's alive right now, because of him," he said candidly.

"Her surgery happened 4 years ago but she's adjusting all this time" he explained.

Adjusting to blindness after a lifetime of sight "beat her up pretty bad," he confessed, and by his account, she's still fighting parts of that loss even now. Being able to reach out and, in her own way, touch Beres's face was something she'd wanted for a long time.

Benji adds a bit more color to who Lisa is. She grew up mostly in the U.S., in New Jersey, though her family hails from Vineyard Town, Jamaica, and she's kept her accent, he explained. Before the surgery, he says, she used to travel back to Jamaica every couple of years to visit family, friends and the property they still hold there — trips that have become far harder for her to make since.

At the end of the night, what stayed with Benji most was simple: This was never just something Lisa wanted. It was something she needed — because, in a very real way, by his own telling, Beres Hammond's music is the reason she's still here to want it at all.