Perspective on the mess, firstly, because you are going to a funeral and this is just a mess. A regular, easy problem with a regular, easy solution. And you weren't even on your way to the funeral proper, just on your way into town and you still have baaaarely enough time before the visitation to wash and dry her only appropriate outfit, which is now covered in vomit. Everything is fine. She immediately felt so much better and she is fine and all of it is fine because it's just a mess and this is a Grand Scheme Day and if your car smells faintly of vomit all summer it will only serve to remind you that you are alive.
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| A liberal application of beans on toast is helpful for both grief and iffy stomachs. |
Perspective also on the funeral, or at least a reprieve from the exhausting drone of your brain as it becomes fully occupied assessing the damage behind you, counting the stuffed animals in the line of fire, eyeballing the nooks and crannies of the many belts and their loops, noticing that oooooooh man she was holding your phone, of course she was.
Coming face-to-face with your ineptitude at wrangling a car seat out of its hooked-in position is a welcome break from fretting about the fact that every time someone says "Sorry for your loss" you respond with "Thanks. (Beat.) I mean, he was 95," as though your habitual refusal to accept compliments ("I think I got it in the clearance section" "Well, it looks like a disaster but at least it tastes okay") has warped into an inability to accept condolences, which maybe makes you come across as someone who is creeping distressingly close to the sociopathy line.
Trying to figure out what exact cleaning-oriented substances need to be sprayed onto various affected surfaces interrupts your parade of attempts to somehow contextualize your grandfather (he was seven when The Great Gatsby was published) (he was your current age in October of 1952) (if he were a Mad Men character he would have been the same age as Roger Sterling) as a way of affixing him to history, your weird but admittedly interesting way of processing mortality.
You will be temporarily freed from your own tyrannical head because life, LIFE! has asserted itself all over the upholstery and maybe you spoke too soon when you said this problem had an "easy" solution because mercy you that splatter traveled.
Here is what you lose when a small child vomits all over the backseat of your car en route to a funeral: your normally-robust ability to avoid writing blog posts in the second person.
