An unexpected death can hurt even when we never knew the person. Within moments of hearing about Shane Warne, my cricket-loving friends and I were texting each other, with no words to express how we felt except an impassioned, collective “what??? ” His sudden departure seemed impossible, even prankish—it was like being told Sydney’s Opera House and Harbour Bridge had mysteriously disappeared—and revealed what a monumental and muchloved fixture in our sporting landscape he had been.
The first person I thought to message was my mother, only to remember, in the nanosecond before I picked up my phone, that she was gone too. We lost her last September, two years after her leukaemia diagnosis, and my family are still in the stage of grieving where we tell everyone that we’re doing “pretty well, considering.” We focus on the positives, as Mum would have done, feeling grateful that we could make the most of our time together, and that her physical sufferings were few.