I talk about my daughter Eden’s ‘big emotions’ quite frequently in this column.
As a three-year-old, she is often overwhelmed by what she is feeling and therefore unable to process it.
She’s slow to come back to the world around her after one of these events where she loses control of her feelings — or rather, her feelings take control of her — but seems to grasp where she has been emotionally afterwards.
What I realised this week though was that I — and I imagine plenty of you out there — have the tendency to do exactly the same thing, maybe with less of the dramatic effect that a flying Barbie adds to the situation.
As I climbed into bed on Friday night — well, early Saturday by the time I had finished consuming sporting highlights from the evening of action — nine-month-old Bonnie began to cry for a bottle.
When I sat down in her rocking chair to facilitate her snack, opening Twitter in the process, I was floored by what I saw.
Shane Keith Warne was no more.
The King of Spin had departed the international scene in much the same way he arrived on to it — stopping the globe in its tracks as it collectively tried to process what its eyes and ears were telling it.
For about the next 24 hours it was all I could think about.
I never met Warney, but as a budding sports journalist there’s a fair chance I watched every delivery he bowled in the last decade of his career.
His ability to direct the theatre of the sporting arena stoked the fires of my journalistic ambition with thoughts that if I could string together a match report with even half of the control that Warne had on every over he bowled, I’d be well on my way to success.
But for all of his sporting heroics, Warney never pretended to be anything other than as human as the rest of us.
All of this kept rattling through my brain, especially as I sought out and consumed as many of the tributes — both written and visual — which appeared online as I could, each one sending me back down the rabbit hole.
It is only now that there is a bit of space between his loss and my current state of mind that I can see the grief spiral within which I was gripped.
Rationalising my ‘big emotions’ was tough as well.
It seems like such a childish thing to be so affected by the death of a public figure that you never met.
But like Phil Hughes and Steve Irwin before him — or Princess Diana for a generation older than mine — Shane Warne left a lasting impact on my life, weaving his way under my guard from the screen or in front of the stands as if he was trying to splay the three stumps behind me in all directions.
And when it came to that task, he was certainly the best there ever was.
What those four examples clearly have in common is the way in which we feel they were ripped from us well before their time.
That longing for what might have been — the missed lunchtime master classes, forgone hours and hours of commentary and relationships with future spinners that will now never be realised — is what stings us the most.
But like a toddler, once the initial emotional haze lifts, we are able to look back on those feelings and embrace them.
For every rip-snorting leg spinner I feign down the middle of my hallway, the twinge of emotion I feel will lessen.
Until the day Eden and Bonnie ask, “what are you doing, Dad?”.
I just might involuntarily burst into tears again when I answer, “A Warnie”.
Tyler Maher is the News editor