It’s Sunday evening, that set of painful hours when all semblance of relaxation fades and my brain busies itself pre-consuming the stresses and pressures of the week. That draft for X Partner that I should have proofread this weekend and didn’t, the research assignment for Y Associate filled with caselaw that apparently doesn’t exist, the growing slew of unanswered messages about to mutiny in my Blackberry, the best strategy for successfully dodging trigger-happy partners seeking “good soldiers” to work over Thanksgiving weekend. I had promised Boyfriend I would accompany him tonight to visit his grandmother, the family matriarch stashed with other assorted octogenarians in an assisted living facility in Riverdale. While I know everyone involved will actively enjoy the visit, I’m visibly fretful, on edge, consumed with plotting the least obvious but most efficient exit strategy so I can return to Manhattan, haven of Perpetual Anxiety, and comfortably obsess over my seemingly-mountainous problems.

We enter the nursing home and the smell is instantly familiar. Disinfectant, Vics Vapor Rub, polish on the perfectly-buffed cream-colored tile floors, open trays carrying easily-digestible yet nutritious food, fermenting bodies plodding down hallways on unsteady legs, flaccid lillies adorning a small table by the massive prehistoric elevator. I’ve watched two grandparents complete their lives in precisely this type of building, where nostalgia permeates the hallways and saturates the cracking skin of every resident, and you leave from a visit with the odor of lives about to end still in your clothes.

“Grandma S, so good to see you!” we intone with the excessive cheer employed by the very young when speaking to the very old. At 89, she misses nothing, her massive blue eyes inspecting us both with vehemence. She turns, balancing precariously on her walker, gingerly ushers us into her tiny apartment and gestures for us to sit in padded wood chairs. I glance at my surroundings, the walls are filled entirely with pictures, standard color snapshots of children, grandchildren, graduations, birthday parties, weddings, the progression of life spans made possible by her endless devotion. My eyes follow the trail to the far wall, holding the black and white photos, yellowing around the corners. Generations of relatives who no longer exist, lives long since finished. I briefly wonder whether my grandchildren will view pictures of my childhood with such open curiosity.

“So! How are you two doing?” She lifts her chin and smiles broadly.

“Oh, we’re fine Grandma S, so happy to see you.”

She turns to me. “You seem a bit fidgety, O. How is everything with you?”

This woman, who in the past half century survived the deaths of two husbands, two siblings, a son, and two children-in-law is staring at me with alert, merry eyes, while I’m entirely immersed in tomorrow’s research project. I’m suddenly smacked with my own foolishness, how I must seem to her, a child slowly suffocating under blankets of problems and stresses that seem momentous but in fact barely exist.

“Things are fine, I’ve been so busy with work and everything.” I try to smile through strained lips.

“I think you worry too much.” She nods, daintily patting the neatly-coiffed helmet of blue hair encasing her head. “You know, worrying about things that might happen in the future, it’s all so silly. You never really know whether the thing you’re worrying about will ever happen. Then, if it does, you have to deal with it just the same. And if it doesn’t, you wasted all that time worrying.”

“I suppose, but-“ I start to argue out of pure habit, then realize I have absolutely no retort. Her point is immaculate, and undeniably true.

“I remember when my oldest was about four.” She continues as if I hadn’t spoken. “He used to get into everything. My friend Marge used to ask me why I never seemed to worry about him. I kept watch over him of course, but you can’t look after a child 24 hours every day.”

She glances down and settles her hands in her lap. I stare at the protruding veins, purple age spots dotting her skin, yellowed stubs of nails. How had they looked when she was 27?

“Then one day, he found his little sister’s rattle. It was made of celluloid, I don’t know if they still have those types of rattles now, it’s very flammable.”

I shrug uncertainly. I’m hardly an expert regarding current trends in baby toys.

“Well anyway, he loved playing with that rattle all around the house. We had one of those space heaters with the red coils in our kitchen, and you could touch them if you tried. One afternoon, I was about to go to the grocery store when I heard the babysitter screaming, these blood curling screams from downstairs. I was in the bedroom, and I ran down to the kitchen, scared out of my mind, and found my boy on fire. I could see the rattle, and his shirt, in flames. He had decided to touch the heat coil with the toy, and it caught fire in his hands.”

“That’s so horrible!” Boyfriend interjects.

“Oh it was terrible. His hands were blackened, he was screaming in pain. I raced into the street and stopped the first car that drove by, begged them to take him to the hospital. Afterwards there were months of visits to the pediatrician, the childrens hospital, he was so brave, I had to change the bandages on his hands every night and it hurt so much. He had scars for the rest of his life. Before he died, I remember looking at his hands, seeing those scars, remembering that rattle.”

My inner lawyer is twitching violently. I’m mapping out my argument as if her story was the initial question on a first year Torts final. Product liability! The issue spotting was too simple. Selling children’s toys made of such flammable material would present a blatant avoidable danger. Not to mention producing space heaters with open coils hot enough to ignite plastic. Perhaps negligence per se? Or res ipsa? I’m too rusty on torts to remember the seminal cases. And you’d have such a sympathetic plaintiff, a permanently scarred child, not to mention the additional damages for pain and suffering, the mother’s claim of emotional distress….

“You should have sued the rattle company! You would have had an excellent case.”

She looks at me as if I’ve just squirted the entire tube of Ben Gay sitting on her coffee table directly into my mouth. “We didn’t do that sort of thing. Things were different back then. Accidents happened, you dealt with them, you moved on.”

As soon as she speaks, I regret spewing the words. With one sentence I’ve bulldozed the poignancy of her reminiscence and masterfully undermined her point. A classic lawyer move, filled with pedantry and self-importance, one I’m ashamed to have made in present company.

“Anyway, that day taught me never to worry. Even if I had spent the previous 20 hours sitting in a dining room chair chewing my nails worrying about my boy getting hurt, I still wouldn’t have been there at that precise moment to keep him from touching that coil. And afterwards, no amount of my worry would stop his pain or keep him from getting into more trouble the day he was healed. Sometimes things happen that we can’t predict. We just have to be smart and quick and deal with them as best we can.”

I sit in my uncomfortable wooden chair feeling like a 5-year-old assigned Time Out for naive impudence. At the end of my life, will I be able to impart stories like this to harried, self-absorbed youths lacking the perspective of a lifetime spent drawing meaning and value from tragedy and pain? Or will I still be engrossed in my own minute hemisphere, worrying about bills, family members making questionable life choices, whether my life in fact possessed any higher meaning? How can I avoid ending up merely an aging anxiety machine, programmed to dissolve into a pool of trepidation and high blood pressure over every perceived problem?

I glance at Boyfriend, who’s staring back at me with concern – likely because I’ve been quiet for a full minute, he knows I must be engrossed in thought – and smile openly for the first time that day. Some worry may be unavoidable, but not a foregone conclusion. I can start by being present, here, at this moment, in this cramped room overflowing with aged wisdom and authenticity, with the man I love and this radiant woman, engaging in her life, truly listening to what she has to say. In a decade, when her existence is reduced to new pictures on different walls, I won’t remember tomorrow’s research project, X Partner or tonight’s emails buzzing for attention. I may not even remember the definition of negligence, let alone the details of res ipsa. But whenever I begin to worry, chew my lower lip, retreat into my panic-stricken cave of anxiety over the future, I’ll recall the mental picture of Grandma S soothing a crying child as she changed seeping bandages on his blackened hands, and the smile she displayed today in spite of it.