My mother is doing OK. It’s been eighteen months since she lost her house, her books, her cats and the love of two of her children because she can’t stop drinking. Now she has a room, and a bathroom, in a seniors’ residence in downtown Ottawa.

She still drinks. The colour of amber rum diluted by ice is a light topaz, golden and rich looking. She has one going all the time, night and day. In her residence, unless someone has signed a Do Not Release form, inhabitants are free to come and go, once they navigate the locked doors and can get down the nine steps to the street. She can get to the liquor store.

The fact she is looked in on every day, all day and night long, for housekeeping and bed checks, means my mother at least sees people. When she was in the house, she saw pretty much no one except bootleggers and taxi drivers, to whom she handed her credit cards for liquor and cigarettes. My mother’s health is better than it was. A nurse administers her medications. When she lived in the house, she never took her drugs.

My mother is lonely. She has cut off contact with the two friends she had, because, as she says, they insulted her about her drinking. And the drinking is more important. Two of her children live in Ottawa. One has absolutely no contact with my mother, and one comes around every few months. I now have no contact with those sisters.

In my time in Ottawa, my mother and I had gone for lunches, shopped and had a drive in the Gatineau Park that stretches to the north of the city. She has come to the house where I am staying several times.

When she comes to visit, she cooks, something she misses. My mother hates the food in the seniors’ home. She refuses to go to most meals, and a corner of her room has been turned into a kitchen — coffee maker, microwave, bar fridge, toaster. The dishes get piled in her small bathroom sink. She eats a lot of chocolate. She eats out a lot, which she cannot afford to do.

So over at the house, we have made the food she misses. Oven fried chicken (twice), brownies, corn on the cob, baby beets and steak (which I cooked badly). She sits in the back yard or on the couch looking at the TV, drinking.

Sometimes it is OK. Sometimes she annoys me and I look forward to taking her back to her room. Sometimes she doesn’t annoy me and there is some sadness. It’s never neutral.

Either way, I pile her into the car with small bags of leftovers. I have to remind her several times to put on her seat belt, and mostly she can’t do it, and reacts with anger. We drive along the Ottawa River, on the quiet lovely parkway, and into the downtown. I unload her and get her back up the stairs.

Often the drive back, as evening is coming on with the clouds of my childhood, is very beautiful. I get back into the yard and sit at the table with the detritus of our meal and visit — tags, plates, an empty cigarette package, napkins, glasses. Her last glass of rum will be sitting there, gone pale with melted ice.

I will sit and sigh awhile and then clear those things away.