Grief can be silent or embarrassed, but for Phillip Hughes true sadness has bloomed

What a strange, sad week it has been.

There had always been the prospect, even a sort of collective assumption, that somehow Phillip Hughes would survive his injury. Look at Michael Schumacher, Alex McKinnon, even Molly Meldrum – all returning to us broken, but still returning.

Television had been replaying Hughes’s collapse on the pitch that week with the sort of optimism that indicated his recovery was a done thing. When his death was announced on Thursday, we were shocked. A cricket ball? But he’s only 25 ...

Friends in offices talked about the gasps of “no” when it was announced that Hughes had died. Another mate, behind the bar at a pub, watched drinkers use a pool cue to turn the volume up on the TV as they gathered around in stunned sadness.

In these things, the emotions usually fade after a couple of days. Strong feelings flare up quickly in these fast-paced days, the collective stormfront moves on, and something else becomes the vehicle for our passions, our hates, our fears. But not this. This lingered.

The shrines started appearing that Thursday evening. Bats began to appear out the front of houses and shops, on farm fence posts, at sporting ovals, apartment blocks. There were all sorts; bats that rich people buy, bats that looked like salvaged planks of wood, plastic kids’ bats, old Gray Nicolls Vipers, ancient bats from the 80s, split wood held together with gaffer tape.

It quickly went beyond Australia. There were bats were left out on doorsteps in the dusty, distant parts of the globe where cricket is played, to bats wedged in faraway snowdrifts from some heartsick, cricket-loving expatriate.

Social media played a part in disseminating the tributes, but it felt different to other movements. It felt more authentic, not just a hashtag thing. On it went all that week.

On Saturday, Hughes’s great friend Michael Clarke gave a press conference that was devastating to watch. At the height of it, he almost seemed to be gasping for air. There was a pause in the background as all the camera shutters stopped. As if governed by a collective unconscious, the press stopped shooting just for a moment – as if to create a pocket of air for him.

On social media, at the press conference, in a newspaper column – Clarke’s grief raged undisguised. It ennobled him somehow. He had before been a bit of a divisive character, with his million-dollar contracts and gossip magazine girlfriends.

After having lost someone close who hasn’t felt just what he felt: disbelief and sorrow, the struggle for breath when talking about the person you’ve lost, the desire to have, more than anything, “just one more day”.

Grief is usually done silently and at home. With Clarke we saw it in full bloom, in public. From that place empathy flows. But why do we feel so sad, all the people who didn’t know him?

On Radio National this week, Waleed Aly asked the same question, and wondered, tentatively, if the very bad year this planet has experienced has now plunged us into a state of grief. Was Phillip Hughes’s death somehow a conduit, channelling our suffering from a year of tragedies?

MH17, Ukraine, MH370, Gaza, Isis, beheadings, Ebola, Ferguson – what has 2014 been except an unrelentingly bleak year? There’s so much sadness around, it feels as if the bough would break from just one more thing.

Sometimes in moments of collective grief, we look back with the faint residue of embarrassment. What was that all about?

But these times also have great power, giving us the ability to strip back the veneer, to take us some place deeper, to reveal something true.

Maybe it’s because Hughes’s death feels a bit like an attack on a part of old Australia’s DNA: the idea of young men, and country towns, and cricket pitches, long sleepy summers watching the Test, where the highest praise was to be described as “humble” or a “good bloke”, of being 25 and having it all in front of you.

In 1937 poet Edna St Vincent Millay wrote that “childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies”. Until last week, there was a sense that cricket was that kingdom too.