AT 77, SHE'S THE MOM OF A CRACK ADDICT

We pull up kitchen chairs in her little bachelor suite, and she
apologizes for not being able to offer a more comfortable seat. It's a
tight fit for two in the tiny senior's apartment.

She'll soon be 77. Up until a couple years ago, she believed that she
had reached a point in life where things had more or less settled out.
With her seven kids grown up with lives of their own, she was looking
forward to an uneventful old age.

Her first sense that she might be wrong about that was at the family's
annual camp-out in 2005. Her 46-year-old son, always a bit of a
hothead, flew into a fit of temper of grand proportions. Another son
told her the problem was cocaine.

She didn't believe it at first. But then relatives came from Australia
to visit that year and her son showed up looking sick in a way that
really alarmed her. "That's when I started to wonder," she
acknowledges.

As it turned out, her son had developed a severe addiction to crack
cocaine. She doesn't know when or why he started using the drug, but
by that summer his problems were frighteningly obvious.

It's been a hard ride down ever since.

In short order, her son lost his wife, his four kids and his job. He
lost his house -- sold as part of the divorce settlement -- then blew
every cent of his share of the proceeds on crack.

He hasn't yet fallen to the streets. But only because one of his
sisters simply won't let that happen, even if it means going down to
Centennial Square time and again to bring her exhausted, sick brother
home to her house.

Desperate to help him, the family scrounged up $37,000 for a month of
treatment at a private addiction facility. He was a "star" participant
while in the program, says his mom, but relapsed shortly after getting
out.

She knows there has to be an explanation for her otherwise
straight-arrow son's headlong fall into the abyss. He was working too
hard, she suspects. He lives with some ghosts from childhood that she
only recently found out about.

Still, she admits she didn't see any of it coming.

"Of all of us, he's always been the one who drinks the least," she
says. "I can't understand why he ever would have tried crack -- he
doesn't even smoke.

"All his life, he's held down a job, and sometimes another small job
on the side, too. He's a bright, intelligent man -- even now, we'll
meet for lunch and I can't believe how quick and bright he is. And
he's a wonderful father."

She's heard conflicting advice from friends and family about how to
handle her son's addiction. Some have told her that she's "enabling"
him by giving him money and rescuing him from the streets. Their
theory is that addicts need to hit bottom before they get well and
that she's preventing her son from doing that.

But she can't imagine withdrawing her support.

"You remember that old saying from the '70s about how if you loved
someone, you'd set them free?" she asks. "I think for addicts, if you
love them, you never set them free."

Her other children are sharply divided over how much support their
brother deserves and upset at the chaos and stress his addiction has
caused within the family. The annual family camp-out hasn't happened
since that summer when her son lost his temper.

"Nobody can possibly understand how addiction impacts a family until
it's them," says the woman, who has dipped heavily into her retirement
savings in an attempt to help her son.

"You can't imagine the sleepless nights I have. I'll lie in bed
thinking of all the things that could be happening to him. To know
he's out there, where bad things are happening all the time -- I just
don't know what to do."

So she holds on, hoping against hope that a mother's full-on love will
be enough.

She tells a story of her daughter going down to the streets one
morning to rescue her brother yet again, and of how long it took to
rouse him from his deep, dark sleep. The people he was with -- all in
the grips of their own addictions -- watched in silence as his sister
repeatedly called his name.

"Nobody said anything," the mother recalls, "but my daughter was
struck by the feeling that all of them wished they had somebody to
come for them, too. All these men out there, so lost."