7th August -What we do in life ...

... echoes into eternity

7th August
What we do in life echoes into eternity

Having ordered the wetsuit, I spend a couple of weeks anticipating its arrival. Meanwhile, I dream about it almost every night. Some nights I dream it’s a perfect fit, and I dive through a trap door in the cupboard under the stairs into a fast flowing green river, joined by my children in matching wetsuits. Other nights, I dream it is rough and scratchy and I can’t get it on. When I do, I swim out to sea and get caught up in a shipping lane. On those nights I wake tangled in the duvet with my head stuck inside the pillowcase. When the wetsuit finally lands on my doorstep it’s a bit of an anti-climax. I unfurl it and look at it. It seems rather misshapen – a hollow shell of a woman – although it’s possibly an impression of how I might look if I ever become severely dehydrated or undergo extreme liposuction.

It takes me almost two weeks to have a go at putting it on. I want to leave aside an evening when I have a couple of hours spare so that I don’t have to rush it. I also need several people on hand in case I get stuck. I get it out of the box and look at it again. My kids come downstairs and look at it as well.
‘It’s a shame we’re not Amish,’ says my son, ‘we could get the whole village to help you.’ He has a point.
I manage the legs ok, and then it takes both kids to help me on with the arms. In the middle I stop, because I have to cry. But finally, I get into it, and although it’s boiling hot in there, it fits! I am so excited, I get in the car and go round to Kate’s house to show her. After all, she was the one who did the measuring, and I’m sure she would like to see the product of her toils.

After showing it off to Kate, her children, her children’s friends, her neighbours, their children, their children’s friends and a man who drops by to measure up her new windows, the wetsuit has become very hot and is gripping me rather uncomfortably. I have a horrid panic that I won’t be able to get out of it. I see myself doomed - incarcerated in neoprene forever; having to wearing a cardi over it for work, perhaps adding a tutu for special occasions. Fortunately, it is not too difficult to undo, and I pop out of it in a fountain of perspiration and peel it off.

The wetsuit, does however, raise a whole set of new dilemmas. From a very early age, my children have taken a keen interest in the prospect of my mortality and their plans for my funeral arrangements are a popular topic of tea time conversation. Some might say this is healthy, but, occasionally, it seems to me that the tone of conversation is a little too enthusiastic and the finer points of my life and achievements are being glossed over in exchange for sensation. Playing the TARDIS sound effect as the coffin makes its journey through the crematorium curtains is one thing, but inviting mourners to attend, dressed as the Dr Who villain of their choice, is in my view, a step too far. Anyway, I like to think that the news of my death, whenever it comes, will have such a devastating effect upon my wide circle of my friends, that they simply won’t have the emotional energy to consider fashioning themselves a Slitheen outfit from an old pair of curtains and some tennis balls.

Now the wetsuit has arrived, the latest macabre source of conversation is whether or not I want to be wearing it when I’m in my coffin - or whether I would just like it in the coffin with me, presumably so I can swim free in the afterlife. Whatever my corpse is wearing, it’s my view that coffin is likely to be packed tight and the wetsuit will simply make it even more difficult to jam the lid on. Should I meet my end while wearing the wetsuit (caught up in the shipping lane, possibly) then having the wetsuit as a central feature of the funeral might be considered to be in poor taste. Mind you, another friend has volunteered to play Merrily We Roll Along very fast on the organ to accompany the journey of the bier into the crem, so taste is unlikely to be the hallmark of that particular ceremony.