Over-worrying

Maybe it's a normal stage of grief, after the passing of a close family member, to worry excessively about everyone. Whether it's normal or not, I find myself doing exactly that. Mostly it's confined to myself and my sons, but not exclusively. (I may have mentioned before that ever since my mom died, the first thing I do every morning is check my phone for calls or text from/about my sons. Despite the fact that I talk to each of them almost every day, it's my weird little way of making sure they are okay so I can get on with my day.) Today when my son, his girlfriend and I went to the orientation at his new college, we were speaking with his admissions advisor, who mentioned not having slept well because his daughter was up at three in the morning. I asked how old his daughter is. He said she is four and a half months, and his wife is away. What? Now, maybe it's just because I breastfed each of my sons for a year, but that seems very young for a mother to leave her child overnight. I'm not judging; I'm just saying. Anyway it's not my business.

Last week when we were driving home, my son was reading news storied to keep me entertained. He was reading from a list of headlines and if either of us found one interesting, he would read the full story. One headline was something along the lines of "Three-year-old saves elderly man trapped in car". That one made me curious. This was supposed to be one of those feel-good stories, but it was actually quite horrifying. A woman somewhere in Texas went to a church benefit and left her husband, who was sixty-eight and had suffered two strokes in the past six months and had recently been released from the hospital, sitting in the car with the windows up and the engine off. A three-year found the man trying to open the door. The little boy wasn't able to open the door, nor was the man -- the handles had been malfunctioning for several months -- so he found the pastor who came out and opened the doors. By this time the temperature inside the car was 120 degrees. The pastor asked the man if he needed an ambulance; the man declined and just asked to be taken inside to cool off.

It's nice that the man didn't die, but I have a few questions here. Am I just overly concerned, or are there some big problems? Why was this man in the car in the first place? If his wife really had to go to the church benefit, surely she could have found a better place to park her husband than in the boiling car! And why was a three-year-old roaming the parking lot alone? Church parking lot or not, toddlers should not be walking unaccompanied between cars! I can't even tell anymore what's okay. At the orientation today, parents were wearing sheer tops over bathing suits, kids and parents were texting during presentations, people were dropping doors in other people's faces and pushing past others in line. Other than the sheer tops (I don't claim to be part of the fashion gestapo) these are among my pet peeves -- and truly I don't have many. I hope this whole worrying thing is just a phase. I'm not sure how much of this I can take.