Josh Baker was 20 when he died. He was Lisa and Paul Baker’s only child, a loving son and a fiercely talented young cricketer. Two years on, and the shock and anguish do not leave them.“We wake up every morning thinking about Josh,” says Lisa.
“He’s our first thought in the morning, and our last at night,” says Paul. “We’ve probably dreamt about him, too.”Such a shattering event changes perspectives on life.Lisa, a services manager for a packaging company, recently decided to retire. “I just thought, what’s the point?’ I now have these moments where I go for it. One was in Australia during the winter. Paul and I had gone on this wine tour and, on the coach, there was a family. Their girl said, ‘I’m jumping out of a plane tomorrow, if you fancy joining me?’“I did it. I don’t like heights, I don’t like small planes, but it was brilliant. Apart from spiders, I have no fear now. Nothing can hurt me like I’ve been hurt.”Paul listens, then takes a deep breath.“I wouldn’t wish this on anybody, but you get to the stage where how you look at the world is completely different,” he says. “We know what we’re missing, and what we can never have — it’s best if people don’t tell us, because we are aware of that.”Josh Baker playing for Worcestershire in 2021 (Jacques Feeney/Getty Images)Josh passed away on May 2, 2024.A promising spin bowler for Worcestershire, he had already made 47 appearances for the county across all formats — including 22 first-class games — and represented England at junior level. That morning, his close friend and team-mate Henry Cullen was supposed to pick him up from home on their way to play in a second-team match.Josh was a stickler for timekeeping and seldom late. But he was on that day.Cullen’s messages went unanswered and, with time ticking on, he and his dad contacted Paul, knowing Josh’s silence was uncharacteristic. Paul phoned Spencer, a good friend from Australia who was staying with the Bakers that summer while he played club cricket in England. Spencer was the only person in the house with Josh but, when he picked up, he was unaware of any issue. The shower was running upstairs, and he had assumed Josh was in it.It was only then that he put two and two together and realised it had been on for an hour and a half.After receiving no response as he banged on the bathroom door, Spencer barged in and found Josh unconscious. He tried desperately to resuscitate him, but to no avail.“I was in a meeting, and Paul had been ringing my phone,” Lisa says. “One of the girls got me and said, ‘You need to go home.’ I pulled in round the corner. There was a fire engine and two ambulances blocking the road.”Josh had passed away from sudden arrhythmic death syndrome (SADS) — when someone dies following a cardiac arrest and no obvious cause can be found in the post-mortem, with the structure of the heart appearing normal. He was gone in a matter of seconds. SADS affects around 500 people in the United Kingdom every year.“The undertakers were carrying him out of the house, and we were in the garden,” recalls Paul. “It was just so surreal. ‘What the f*** do we do now? Where do we go?’“I wanted to be at Worcestershire’s ground and to sit in the same seats we were sat in when he took his first senior wicket, (Warwickshire’s) Sam Hain. It was us and three friends, just wailing in those seats.“If I look back to that day and the conversations I had, some things happened that are crystal clear. But then there are things in the proceeding weeks, the decisions we made, I have no idea of. But I think that’s how your brain deals with trauma.”Worcestershire’s players conduct a minute’s applause for Josh Baker while wearing No 33 shirts for their County Championship game at Kent in May 2024 (Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)Paul and Lisa were left contemplating why. Why did it happen? Why Josh? They were questions that were unanswered even as the family held a celebration of Josh’s life on June 10 that year, a month after his passing. “Most of your life, things happen for reasons, and I was trying to get answers as to why it happened. The longer it goes, there is no answer,” says Paul. “We went to therapy for 18 months, which was offered to us by the PCA (Professional Cricketers’ Association). It started every couple of weeks, then we pushed it to every month, and then every three months.”Quite astonishingly, even through their own first wave of grief and shock, Paul and Lisa returned to the cricket ground a few days later wanting to see Josh’s team-mates and to check on them.“We were keen right from the word go to be visible,” Paul says. “If that helped the players to see us there, I don’t know, but I didn’t want to be hiding away from it.”Josh, as a precocious and professional cricketer, was in the public eye. His family, along with the PCA, needed to move quickly to put together a press release announcing his death, but that limited the window of time to inform all those who had known and loved him of the devastating news.“By 11am he was pronounced dead, and by 12pm he was being carried out of the house by the undertakers,” says Lisa. “By 3pm there was a press release going out. For most grieving families — to be honest, we weren’t even grieving at that point, because it was shock — they wouldn’t have to deal with all that.“But on the flip side, after that, we needed to use his status as a way to keep his memory alive and to do something good for other people.”
