Black Humour

A couple of weeks ago I saw an excerpt of an interview with Julian Morrow (of the Chaser comedy team) concerning his thoughts about God, death and the meaning of life. It was in a meeting of the Monash University Christian Union, and it was a stimulus to think about how we assign meaning to our lives in a Christian perspective. Julian Morrow related that several times he's been at the bedside when someone died. Then he mentioned the comic perspective, the black humour of death. With one elderly relative, the family all came to his bedside to say their farewells. Then a few hours later, he was still alive, so they all came back and did it again. This was repeated once more. Julian Morrow could see the darkly funny side of the scene.

Of course I sat there thinking about Jen's death almost two years ago. My first response was to wonder what could be remotely funny about that. But on reflection, I started to think about how one kind of humour depends on a dissonance. In the classic Monty Python 'Dead Parrot' sketch, the key element is that the parrot is obviously dead, but the pet shop owner is trying to convince the customer that it's merely 'pining for the fjords'.

Jen's last day was scattered with dissonances and some Monty Python moments - ironic since Jen didn't find John Cleese very funny at all. The underlying reality was that Jen's decline had been so rapid that I wasn't really prepared for how close she was to dying. Driving back from Lake Entrance to Melbourne on the Monday (July 20th, 2009), Jen was drifting in and out of consciousness, yet repeatedly saying "I'm fine". In retrospect I'm fortunate that Jen didn't die in the car on the way home, which might have led to an even more bizarrely dark farce of driving with a dead person in the passenger seat.

When we arrived home, the next scene resembled one of those dreams or nightmares where I am trying to accomplish a task that always seems to just beyond me, such as trying to find a familiar place but never managing to arrive. Jen was on the edge of complete unconsciousness, and unable to stand up by herself. Perhaps I could have called an ambulance. I wonder if I should have taken her inside and allowed her to die at home, as she had wished (but then I would have had no pain relief to give her, and in any case I probably couldn't have got Jen inside without help). Since we were towing a small caravan, I decided that I needed to detach it from the car before we drove to the hospital, as I couldn't imagine where I'd park it safely. Again that now seems a ridiculous priority, but I was in a desperate rush. I couldn't manage to reverse the caravan into the driveway in several attempts, nor to pull it onto the front lawn by myself (the front wheel just dug into the wet ground), and I ended up driving it onto the nature strip and taking it off there. With a little more style it could have been Chaplainesque.

At the hospital, having parked directly outside casualty, there was another slightly farcical interlude where I queued up at the admission window for a bit before I could persuade someone (in fact two or three people in the end) to come and help Jen into a wheelchair so we could get her inside. Now it's obviously protocol that every nurse or doctor treating a patient has to introduce themselves to the patient and ask how they are, even if they are apparently non-responsive. The last Pythonesque moment was a succession of three or four medical staff who in turn came to look at Jen and talk to her, even though she was unconscious and I was the only person who knew anything about who she was or what was happening. Just for a moment I wished I was a ventriloquist.

Whatever comforting scripts we have in our heads about the process of dying - the people you love gathered around you as you close your eyes for the last time - my experience is that it's in fact unscripted, messy and confusing, hence the black humour that creeps in unbidden. I didn't know Jen was going to die right then, and my diary in the days before is full of mundane details. Yet despite all the lonely crisis of Jen's last day, the final outcome was as good as I could have wished. The people in palliative care could give Jen pain relief (important even when unconscious), and they looked after her well and helped me get a grip on the situation. As we had both wanted in different ways, I was sitting there beside her holding her hand when she died. It was an unexpected privilege - to have come through the desperate farce of a day and have those last few quiet moments alone with Jen. I'm thankful to have been granted that moment of grace.