I come from a long line of worriers of many worthy worries. My grandpa Nels, who was born in 1866 and died in 1968 at 102 probably logged the most worries in our lineage. He worried mostly about suffering, close to home and far away. I remember a moment at the dinner table when he said he was worried about the crisis in Africa which was in the news. What crisis, asked someone. “The children are starving! Oh, those poor children” he wailed and began to cry. My father asked someone to please pass the chicken and the conversation moved on.  Nels also worried that I would die. He had been a “sickly” child, and in the middle of winter after several weeks of being “confined to bed” a neighbor in their dirt-poor community in northern Minnesota, came to visit. “Oh dear,” she said to his father, “little Nels won’t last to see that tree in bloom.” He remembered how at 9 years old he looked out the window at the bare-limbed apple tree and at that moment felt the weight of the prediction. So, in spite of my obvious robust good health as a child, he worried that every time he saw me might be the last.

My mother, his daughter, was a champion worrier, specializing in the short-term future. Would the plumber really come tomorrow? Would she find a parking spot downtown? She fixated about food. If an egg had protein but also cholesterol, should she eat it? She never ate another grape in her life after Cesar Chavez told her not to. She worried about politics, despairing that all her worrying had no impact on the outcome of an election. In her later years she became so anxious that her doctor prescribed an anti-anxiety pill which she could take as needed. She chose to take it every afternoon at 1:00… and yes, she worried incessantly that she might forget to take it.