Graham Thorpe - Another One
Peter Langston | August 13, 2024
A difficult few days, wrestling with something I know which others don’t want to hear, don’t want to believe.
Any comment will quickly draw the comment “how do you know?” You can’t really explain that your grim experience, repeated too often, means you know the signs. Comments from colleagues. Their devastation. Cause of death withheld. The air of regret which pervades all official comment. You know. The history of manic celebration of unbelievable achievement and the frank admissions of those times when it all reverses into a lonely, bleak space. A tell all auto-biography.
Unfortunately, it drags me back to those moments when I was blind to other more reasonable, certainly more tenable options and saw only one door on offer, variously beckoning in varying degrees of ajar. Reading this, you can’t fathom the depth that despair can take you to, the ultimate destination where choice is extinguished. You can’t know the pain, the screaming desire to escape the internal questioning, the unwarranted self-shame which goes so much further in its assault. You’ve failed, let everyone down and these feelings just won’t ever relent.
Batting with Brian Ian Polar or his mate, David Ernest Pression is a dangerous pastime. Just when you think you are on top, a sudden unexpected runout can bring about the end of your innings and guess who they’ll blame. People watching face-palm in disbelief, cry in their grief that your blazing innings has been cut short.
Too many have gone that way, including one of my own cricketing favourites. I never saw Syd Barnes bat. Never met him. I know him only from tales of his batting genius and outlandish behaviour told by uncles often agog at his antics rich or poor; from his telling of his story in “It Isn’t Cricket” (Collins 1953) and sad newspaper articles sourced from Trove. He was disliked by authority but loved by mates. The hats and coats on the boundary edge cheered or jeered. Bradman hated him (enough reason for admiration right there!). He could be mercurial with bat in hand or dour. He was always looking for ways to make a quid out of cricket off the field and often found his way into trouble in reckless endeavour bought about by his quenchless sense of humour, often with him being the only one left laughing. He was a character. Very few of them about these days.
He took an overdose of barbiturates and washed them down with Draino and left us two weeks before Keith Stackpole made a ton in the Boxing Day test against the Kiwis in 1973. He was 57 and no one wanted to talk about him after that.
Too many others from our game have made that lonely journey: Arthur Shewsbury, Jim Burke, Jack Iverson, David Bairstow and no more tragically but just as unexplained, Peter Roebuck … just to name a few. All immensely talented. All, finally, immensely lonely.
I write for lots of reasons. One of them is to avoid limiting my options and getting to that final moment but each time the confusing news comes and confronted, devastated faces speak of their loss, I’m back there again. Its scares me because that line you cross, almost without choice, is so thin and the result so deceptively appealing that my breath shortens at the thought I might get there again but make the wrong call … yes, no, sorry and back to the everlasting sheds.
Listen when your mates talk about their blackness. Don’t try and bamboozle them with distraction or fix them with guilt at their ruminations. Listen. Accept their feelings as real. Don’t be frightened. Its not catching. You’re not the one who will die. Listen and stay close. There are things you can do but that’s for another article at another time. Beyond Blue or the Black Dog Institute or RUOK websites will give you lots of good ideas of how to listen and how to help. A few clicks. They’re worth it, surely.
I’m a poet. This is how I’m feeling today …
ANOTHER ONE
Another lonely inappropriate end
Another unfulfilled life
overflowing with achievement
engulfed in love
with one moment’s too much sorrow
too much pain
too little hope
and no connection
to better tomorrows.
I count them sometimes
Read their stories
Search for the options
blackness obscured from them
and wonder why I am still here
counting, reading, searching
too scared to escape
too frightened to live
feet clawing for traction in the peat
of a longer life than necessary
head fog-bound in the next five minutes
a little unsure of the poor choice
lost in acronyms
CBT, GAD, RUOK
never secure enough to be safe
from being the next entry
on some other counter’s list
I take the next sip
Draw the wool in around my waist
Lie to every enquiry which walks past
and count something else
