The hands of God

Sometimes there just isn't much you can do to make things better.

When your best friend's husband has cancer and she calls to tell you. How do you talk back? Sick feeling in the stomach, lump in the throat, eyes welling. That doesn't help much.

When your college, sit-on-the-balcony-and-talk friend loses her mother to a suffocating lung disease. What can you do? Send flowers?

When your tennis partner's husband lies, or your neighbor's all-grown-up baby moves away ... Or your glass-of-wine friend moves --friendless -- across the country...

Traumatized.

Grieving.

Betrayed.

Empty.

Lonely.

You can't put a bandaid on that.

Even food doesn't salve the pain of a heart truly shattered and a mind flying around looking for the window to reason.

When I wake in the night, turning worry into prayers for a friend, I grasp for something to help ease the pain.

Only one thing I've found. Hand-holding.

When Patti Anne and I were in college, we would sit at night on the balcony of the Phi Mu house. We talked a lot about changing the world as we watched the girls next door stumble up the sidewalk with their dates.

Some of our sorority sisters looked sideways at us -- two coeds from separate, enemy sororities who really didn't give a rip what their cliquish friends thought. There were no cell phones to interrupt us. No email messages waiting.

All the stars lined up right last week and we were able to get together for dinner in Memphis. Only a few weeks away from the death of her gorgeous, silver-haired mother, Patti Anne talked about being motherless, about minor regrets and about major breakthroughs. She brought gorgeous roses just like the ones from her mother's famous rose garden.

Tears came and went. Mine and hers.

Maybe that's what we were practicing so many years ago in the rocking chairs on the balcony. Maybe that's just the way we change the world.

Hand holding.