Most people across Australia feeling sadness and some wrench of loss at the death of cricketer Phillip Hughes didn’t know him – but we feel like we did.
Hughes was a 25-year-old bloke playing cricket. Yes, he played at an elite level but cricket is something familiar to Australians, something knowable and safe.
It’s the national game and so many Australians, from four-year-olds to 60-year-olds and beyond, play it for fun. It’s not supposed to kill you.
The batsman from the NSW north coast town of Macksville was also someone we could identify with: a battler fighting his way back into the Australian side, a son, a brother, a mate.
His death, from injuries suffered after being struck in the neck by the ball during Tuesday’s Sheffield Shield match, shocked the nation.
The severity of the shock has multiple causes, says grief and bereavement expert Chris Hall.
Playing cricket on a Tuesday afternoon is not how young men with the world before them are supposed to die.
“This wasn’t somebody in what we’d conventionally tink of as a high risk behaviour,” Mr Hall said.
“I think one of the consequences of these sorts of losses is it challenges the assumptions we have about the nature of the world, about how safe and predictable and orderly the world is.”
Mr Hall, chief executive of the Australian Centre for Grief and Bereavement, said the familiarity of our national sporting pastime means it’s not normally associated with risk.
“I’m sure we can expect some parents to have significant levels of anxiety now about their children playing cricket. It’s opened up an opportunity of risk where it’s something that we would perhaps ordinarily not be too concerned about,” he said.
Even when driver Peter Brock died behind the wheel of a rally car in 2006, we were sad but understood motor racing came with dangers.
The circumstances of Hughes’ death add to the grief felt over a young life cut short – particularly when the best medical intervention, something we can normally put our faith in, couldn’t save him.
Adding to that is the sense, through social media and mainstream media, that we knew him even if we weren’t cricket fans.
“Particularly now with social media we’re privy to the ordinariness of people’s lives – the vividness of modern media makes that person more real to us,” Mr Hall said.
The sadness that members of the public feel may not be the deep, unknowable grief of his family or the heartbreak of his friends and teammates but it is something that will affect many people, Mr Hall said.
“Particularly in this case a young guy, a fit guy, the world laying open before him, and then dying in such a sudden and completely unexpected kind of way,” he said.
“Our capacity to identify with others, that sense of empathy is one of the features of being human.”
