Mary,
Keep it simple! Investing in stock mutual funds is NOT very risky. A typical mutual fund buys and owns several hundred stocks, maybe thousands for the larger funds. So your market risk is spread out so that the failure of one company will not even make a blip on the dividends and capital gains from the mutual fund. Starting off, if it were me, I would buy only a large Index stock fund, such as the Fidelity 500 Index Fund (stock symbol FXAIX). It has a 10-year average return of about 12% per year, a low expense ratio, and good management. If you buy and hold for at least 10 years, I guarantee that you will NOT lose any money. Instead you will gain some money for your future retirement. Just don’t do what you did before, panic when the stock market goes down during the periodic economic downturns. Hold what your have, and buy more if you can while the prices are low! Later you may want to put some money into a good world-wide corporate bond mutual fund to produce some income for your investment account (as well as capital gains from the stock fund).