Billy Garaffa, an amateur hockey player who collapsed during a 2022 game and was clinically dead for about 16 minutes, says the experience transformed his faith and left his family changed.
Billy Garaffa went down on the ice when his heart went into ventricular fibrillation and stopped pumping normally, and rescuers worked to revive him for roughly 16 minutes. Medical teams ultimately brought him back and he has recovered physically, but Garaffa says what happened while his heart was not beating reshaped how he thinks about God and life. The episode has since been described in vivid spiritual terms by Garaffa and those close to him.
‘I could smell the sweetest smell,’ Billy said of him on the ice. ‘I felt the Holy Spirit leading me.’
Billy also said the moments of near-death also ‘felt like the real life’. He was eventually brought back to his senses and is healthy in present day, posting about Mother’s Day on his Instagram last week.
‘Everything was orchestrated,’ Billy added. ‘There’s no other explanation.’
The experience has left the Garaffa family forever changed, with their reflection of the incident bringing them closer to God.
Before the game Garaffa says he and teammates prayed together because he had a sense of foreboding, a feeling he later mentioned publicly. “I was on the ice, I don’t really remember much,” Garaffa says, explaining that his heart went into v-fib and he collapsed immediately. V-fib is a life-threatening rhythm in which the ventricles quiver instead of producing steady beats, and it typically requires fast medical treatment to prevent death.
Garaffa recounts an unmistakable spiritual encounter while he was clinically dead: a brightness and a presence he identifies as God. He describes feeling more alive in that light than he does in ordinary life and says the experience felt more real than everyday existence. That intensity and clarity are central to why he considers the event faith-altering.
“But to me, I never felt like I died, because I was standing in the light. I was standing with God. And I felt more alive than I ever had before. And when I say that that felt more real that this right now, it did,” Garaffa says.
In his account Garaffa says God spoke directly, asking him what Jesus taught about the greatest commandment, and the answer clarified everything for him in a simple way. He says the Holy Spirit felt like a hand on his shoulder guiding him back toward a “bubble” at the edge of the light, and that shadow fell away as he returned. The scene, he says, was accompanied by “this amazing light” impossible to describe to someone who had not seen it.
“So I felt God speaking to me, and He… asked me what did Jesus say about the most important commandment, and that was to love your God with all your mind, all your soul, and all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself,” Garaffa says. “And when He said that, everything absolutely made sense. And it made everything so simple, but yet we make it so hard sometimes.”
“And then I felt the Holy Spirit on my shoulder, just leading me back to where the bubble was, just outside the light,” Garaffa continues, “and as I walked, this amazing light, which I can’t even describe to anybody because it would be like trying to describe the color blue to a blind man that’s never seen. And when I was walking back, the shadow just dropped away and the bubble illuminated and I knew it was the Holy Spirit, without a doubt, leading me back to my body.”
When Garaffa looked at his body he initially did not recognize it, and the moment of recognition coincided with his return to consciousness. “When I saw my body, I didn’t even recognize it was me, cause nothing else mattered at that moment, but when I did recognize it was me, that’s whe I woke up,” Garaffa says. After waking he prayed and later had a vision in which he saw Jesus and people around his body guiding responders to do the right things.
“I asked Jesus, ‘Where were you?’ And a while after the incident, I had a vision in my prayer time in the morning. I woke up, I was just laying in bed…and God really brought me back to that moment, and when I was sitting there, looking at the bubble, I could see through the bubble, and I saw Jesus in the bubble, standing and kneeling around my body and just really guiding all the absolute people doing all the right things to bring me back to life.”
“He was there, and He came through that bubble, and he was next to me to save my life. All my wife could pray at that moment was the name Jesus. Without Jesus, I wouldn’t be here today,” Garaffa says
Doctors later found that Garaffa had developed unusual collateral arteries that kept some blood flow going even after his heart stopped, an anatomical quirk that likely helped sustain him during resuscitation. A LinkedIn profile lists him as a property manager at Regan Construction in Snowmass Village, Colorado, a role he has held since 2013. Garaffa says the event has left no doubt in his mind about his faith.
“Without a doubt, I know that…Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior,” Garaffa says. “And I just pray Lord that…if you seek Him, you will find Him. Guaranteed.”
