“Cricket didn’t talk back to me and it didn’t offer advice. It didn’t tell me what to do nor how to feel. Like a best friend, it was just there for me, willing to embrace me and allow me just to be, whatever mood I was in.” This is Ian Ridley on coping with the loss of his wife, Vikki Orvice, in The Breath of Sadness.
Ridley is a football writer and author of a dozen books; his wife, who succumbed to cancer at 56 was an athletics and football writer for The Sun, which was exceptional in an all-male field. Reading The Breath of Sadness feels a bit like peeping through the curtains into another man’s pain, but it is equally an assertion of the power of sport, cricket in particular, to make sense of grief, and help to come to terms with it.
Where the writer is unflinching in describing his feelings and his relationship, the reader might sometimes flinch at the rawness of it all. Ridley writes with feeling on mourning a loved one in a book that finds companionship with two similar ones written by the surviving spouse: A Grief Observed by C S Lewis and the more recent The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. That word ‘magical’ is used by Didion as a synonym for ‘insanity’, where one believes (without any reason) that a particular action can lead to a wished-for result, however crazy that might sound to an outsider.
In the postscript, Ridley writes about his recovery not from grief, but from the insanity of grief.
The County game
It was a remarkable year for English cricket, 2019, when they won the World Cup. It was also the year Ridley lost his wife. There had always been a thought at the back of his mind that in his old age he would spend a summer watching county cricket.
Following the tragedy, his therapist recommended that he do exactly that now. So while the crowds sat through the World Cup and the Ashes series, Ridley spent his time at county grounds with the proverbial three spectators and a dog.
Why county cricket? “You can’t really think about ideas as essential and deep as all of that at a football match,” writes Ridley, “especially with somebody berating the referee in your ear. In fact, the game probably exists to get away from it all. But at county cricket, with its less frenetic unfolding, a person could connect with what really mattered.”
There is too, as he says, the appeal that he could “explore and experience as reflection of the ‘action’, the rhythm and cadences of my grief.” This is an unusual reading of a first class match even if its pace and denouement allows a spectator to take from it what best suits him.
Memorable times
The exploration into the best and worst of himself and his relationship with Vikki is dealt with candidly; sometimes the past cheers him, sometimes, as with certain discoveries, it makes him intensely jealous. Some of the early visits for the cricket were to places Ridley and his wife had spent memorable times in – Hove (Sussex v Leicester), Isle of Wight (Hampshire v Notts), and Scarborough, Lord’s and The Oval…
Watching Middlesex v Sussex at Lord’s following a therapy session marks a turning point of sorts, “a shift,” as he says, “a staging post.”
At another point, during another match, he writes, “Suddenly, in the afternoon lull, the utter so-whattery of it all consumed me.” So-whattery can be a comfort without being an intrusion.
Some people avoid him, others avoid the topic altogether, but such behaviour is to be expected. In A Grief Observed, Lewis wrote, “An odd by-product of my loss is that I’m aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet … Some funk it altogether. R. has been avoiding me for a week … Perhaps the bereaved ought to be isolated in special settlements like lepers.”
No easy answers
There are no easy answers, of course. A season of county cricket didn’t magically make Ridley a different person or push his feelings into the background. Nor did it prepare him totally for another inevitability – he himself is undergoing treatment for cancer and thinks he has five years left.
But cricket served to give Ridley “a destination and an activity, a peaceful place where I could grieve in solitude with humanity still at hand. If I wanted I could be distracted by the game, by its subtleties unfolding, or I could retreat into my pain, to feel it, experience it, and work my way through it. Cricket rewarded sticking with it.”
That last line is a marvellous reminder for all of us, whether grieving or not, or merely hoping to play the game at the highest level.
