Aug. 27, 1999 | Seth sits in the back of the car, crying quietly. My husband and I have just told him we will not pay his rent. He will not get out of the car. Having refused the rent money, we are unable to draw one more boundary: Neither of us tells him to get out of the car.

The young man in the back seat is not recognizable as our son. He is skinny, with a shaved head. His fingernails are dirty and cracked. He sweats profusely, even in cool weather. His clothes are stained, torn at the seams, missing buttons. He shuffles in his untied shoes. He doesn't use his hands to punctuate conversation, the way he used to. He holds them together in his lap to stop their shaking. He still carries around "Crime and Punishment," his favorite book, but he tells us he has trouble concentrating. When he speaks, his words slur, his voice trails off before the ends of sentences.

He looks like someone who is dying.

Aug. 27, 1999 | When I was 13, 14 and 15 years old, I used to give my mother my homework assignments. Ostensibly I was asking her to proofread, to fix grammar, tighten up unwieldy constructions, suggest ways to tie together disparate thoughts. She would give them back with her neat, rounded print quietly annotating the pages. Her comments were always gentle: Maybe this sentence should be a little shorter. I think the reader gets lost in all your words.

Those years certainly helped my writing, but I was doing more than asking my mother for help and she was doing more than offering it. We have always connected best over the written word. The first time I really read Shakespeare -- it was "Romeo and Juliet" -- I remember coming into my parents' room late at night. I was 13. My mother was reading, and I paced around her bed. "There's so much there," I said as if I was the first person to discover this. And she smiled at me, and we talked for a bit and then went back to our reading.

Although I heard what Seth told me about drugs, I interpreted his story as a temporary problem, a problem that could be fixed. Drug abuse did not fit into my sense of who I was as a mother and who he was as my child. My husband might be right -- Seth had a problem, a serious problem -- but I believed he was willing to change. I believed we could help him change.

There's a story we like to tell at Nar-Anon meetings, about a member of our group who was called in the middle of the night. The nurse on the other end of the phone told her to take the next plane to Florida, where her daughter was in the hospital from an overdose. Calculating the plane schedules, she said she couldn't arrive until the next afternoon.

"You have to hurry!" the nurse implored. "She won't be alive in the morning."

"If she won't be alive in the morning," my friend answered, "why should I hurry?"

My friend's daughter did live, which makes it easier to for us to smile, but I think we would smile anyway, drawn together by the black humor of families perched together on the edge.