Why turning Lord’s #RedForRuth is more important than a cricket game between England and Australia

In his third Ashes column, The Maccabees guitarist Felix White draws on his own grief to explain why the Ruth Strauss Foundation can make a powerful impact in reaching people who don’t have the support they need

Andrew Strauss at Lord's for the Ruth Strauss Foundation (Getty)

There are not many incidences in cricketing history when an Ashes Test at Lord’s has offered an opportunity for some wider perspective. So when the ground is flooded with people wearing red in aid of the Ruth Strauss Foundation on Thursday, it will be a significant widening of parameters for this immeasurably layered rivalry, which when boiled down to its elements is a throwing and hitting match for a replica six-inch urn that supposedly once had some cremated bails in them.

The first-day washout was unusually timely from a broadcasting perspective. The lack of cricket left space (no doubt previously earmarked as freewheeling, deja-vu inducing conversation on theories of how to get Steve Smith out) to discuss the back story and ambition behind Andrew Strauss’s initiative. Set up in his wife’s name after her death to lung cancer last year, the foundation is looking to follow in the footsteps of the phenomenal success of the McGrath Foundation, a charity the infamous Australian quick Glenn created under similar circumstances. One of its primary focuses, as Strauss articulates in trademark Strauss logic, is identifying the significant challenges in bereavement, both pre and post, and seeking to facilitate support for loved ones left behind in the wake of death.

The most poignant, if barely noticeable, moment on air after a strikingly candid discussion went out between Strauss and Glenn McGrath on Test Match Special, actually came in the link to Isa Guha after the interview’s first airing. Guha, as a rule brilliantly lucid and fast becoming one of the best broadcasters the game has, was momentarily rendered speechless, forcing words between pointed silences when asked by Jonathan Agnew to reflect on it, given her own mother’s recent death. It was a beautifully human moment, which, more succinctly than any of the gestures of the day, spoke to the universality of the theme. Like song-writing, or indeed across any art form, the most personal is often in the most universal, and it was an early sign of what Strauss’s platform and willingness to confront publicly what most do privately, will no doubt trigger feeling from everywhere.

When my mother died after a long period with an aggressively invasive form of Multiple Sclerosis, at 46, the same age as Ruth Strauss, the world then, though bearing stark similarities (England reaching Lord’s already behind in an Ashes series), already feels comparatively arcane in its response to death. I was lucky in the immediate aftermath. I had an almost accidental structural support system built around me. I was close with my father and two brothers. A network of friends bunked school the next day for an afternoon of distraction tactics. A few teachers asked if they could help. Nonetheless, there were still strikingly few places to go for any kind of actual help. In my case it was left to us four men of different ages each in their own sudden silence, to navigate the now distorted stretch of time in front of us.

From there, as a motherless teenager in the world, the subconscious search for solace began. I was looking for something with the hope that the irreplaceable might be filled with either a sensation that resembled the missing one or airbrushed the need for it entirely. I tried both. Drugs are famously good for that kind of thing. Annoyingly, I wasn’t that good at taking them with any real dedication. It’s not a very long-term solution in any case. I found a very productive one in The Maccabees, which is a story for an altogether different time, but another useful source of extreme distraction, comfort and metaphor was cricket.

Cricket is absolutely brilliant for grief. Somewhere in the world, it’s always happening, slowly meandering to a never-pressing conclusion, and you can always find it. For people with loss issues, this is a source of immense, if often subliminal, comfort. With a sudden self-identification habit for loss, I also had the good fortune of landing in love with the game whilst an England team became the worst side in the world. Perfect. A brand new commitment to a doomed cause. Losing was where the good stuff was and England were good at that. When watching back old footage of the 90s now, I can almost hear my boyish brain saying to itself ‘What’s this? A place to pour time and feelings with the one solid assurance that it’s never going to go away? I think me, the guitar, the TV and the England team are going to be fine just here thank you very much, you can leave me here’. A game in which it’s very motor function is bite-size little deaths (wickets) that you could engage without the fear of your entire world escaping when they happened.

After the brain-breaking process of finishing the Maccabees last record, I found myself on a plane to Australia to get to the last World Cup. England, knocked out in a hurry, were flying home as I landed. That’s the kind of kick I was looking for. I stayed in a friend of a friend of a friend’s garage just to be at the World Cup final in Melbourne. Sleeping in a stranger’s garage on the other side of the world, I began to wonder whether my bereavement-avoidance tactics might need a little looking at. Any form of any loss, however small, would suddenly punch me like experiencing my mother dying again, like all the losses loaded into each other in one blurry confusing loss-punch. I’d be sat at the Oval or in front of TV, resenting cricket, playing one note again and again on a guitar, questioning some life choices.

I have been in counselling for a significant amount of time now in which to be able to observe some of these patterns from afar. Though it never fixes or solves, it helps. Immeasurably. I don’t look for bands and cricket to do it solely anymore. Which is probably just as well. But therein lies some distinct poignancy in what Strauss is doing. When a talented, fortunate person revered by so many goes through something as heartbreaking and humanising as he has, reaching out to people that may not have the same support available to them is an extremely powerful thing that should not be underestimated.

Losing a parent or a partner tends to be the definitive moment in your life. It can’t be anything but that. I have had a recurrence of a dream about my mum in recent years. I go to leave the room we are in, open the door, and I ask whether she’s coming too. She shakes her head and says she can’t, but I can tell her what’s out there. I never met Ruth Strauss but I’m sure she’d be amazed at what’s out there today.