At moments, her expression was focused on some staggeringly distant point I couldn’t discern, at others there was an unbearable presence in her gaze. I was in my 20s and clinging to an abusive relationship. The man in question, after hearing my latest account of my day at the hospital, warned me not to touch my mother. “She might contaminate you,” said the man, who lived a cavelike existence in his New York apartment, where I was strictly forbidden to put any of the shades up.

The next day I came into my mother’s hospital room and sat down, but couldn’t bring myself to touch her. I was suddenly afraid I would catch her state. This lasted about an hour. Then, in that extremity of living — in the last room she would inhabit, with its antiseptic surfaces and green lighting — my mother took over, as she usually did, with a graceful force of will. She looked at me. I put my hands on her hands, on the corporeality of her dying, and my small, cold fear broke apart.

At the moment of her death a few days later, I was broken and weightless at once, large and unafraid. This was her gift, even as I went back to my contracted life with the shuttered man for a few more years.

Since moving back to the United States, I no longer reach for the triclosan-laced soaps that gleam from the supermarket shelf. As it turned out, the best remedy for such impulses was to move to southern Europe. Years of drinking Spanish wines and hearing “no pasa nada” several times a day — spoken by people who know well the value of work and sacrifice — will retool the most threat-wired brain.

I’m aware there’s no shortage of things to fear in the world — mammogram results, terror attacks, a Trump presidency and treatment-resistant bacteria. Still, I’d tell my fellow shoppers grasping at the complimentary store wipes this: Close your eyes and see yourself in a country where your drink comes with a large free snack, usually involving fresh bread and olive oil, and where perfect strangers remind you daily that things aren’t that bad. If at all possible, travel to such a place, even for a week. Short of that, go for a walk in the park. When fears of a contaminated-armrest death creep up, just contemplate the many millions of microbes that sheathe any human body. Most, but not all, are quite friendly.