Normand Brathwaite nearly died from untreated alcoholism this spring

Wednesday at noon, Normand Brathwaite hands across a piece of paper containing the words he'll release to every media outlet Thursday morning. Among them: intensive care, acidocétose diabétique, insuffisance rénale aiguë, troubles liés à l'usage de l'alcool. Alcoholism.

On the morning of April 14, his wife Marie-Claude Tétreault found him on the floor beside the bed, unresponsive. An ambulance carried him from their home in Saint-Paul-d'Abbotsford to Granby hospital, then to the CHUS in Sherbrooke.

Inside the ambulance, paramedics told Marie: "You might want to say goodbye, because we don't know if he's going to make it."

At 67, Normand Brathwaite was dying. His kidneys had shut down. His heart was arrhythmic. His blood had become poisoned. As he recalls it now, with the directness he's always brought to public struggles: "I straight-up died in that ambulance."

When he arrived at the hospital, doctors asked Marie-Claude whether she wanted him resuscitated. She said yes. He spent 42 days hospitalized. Ten of those he spent in a coma.

The path to that moment had begun days earlier, in Gaspésie, where Brathwaite owns a second home. Unpacking, he realized he'd left his diabetes medication behind. In what he now recognizes as staggering recklessness, he decided to simply go without it.

"I was in a rough period," he explains, "because even though I've been on antidepressants for years, you still have the dips." Depression, he notes, gets worse when you add alcohol—a depressant—to the mix.

For a long time, Brathwaite had been using white wine to smooth the waves. Never enough to be visibly drunk on set, he says. But enough that he could drink a bottle, sometimes a bottle and a half, daily. A glass at aperitif. Another during a TV series. Another during the end of a hockey game. Another to forget the Canadiens hadn't won.

Without his diabetes medication, and drinking heavily, his body began its collapse. By the time he reached hospital, he was in withdrawal—and the withdrawal hallucinations were Lovecraftian in their horror. He doesn't want to describe them; doesn't want to see them again in his mind.

Bound to his hospital bed, experiencing visions from the depths of H.P. Lovecraft's imagination, Normand Brathwaite confronted the word he'd long avoided: alcoholism. It wasn't the first time his drinking had drawn public attention. In February 1990, he was intercepted on the Jacques-Cartier Bridge with a blood-alcohol level exceeding the legal limit. But that was 36 years ago. Since then, he'd managed his drinking in ways that allowed him to function, to work, to be the Normand people knew.

Now, at 67, after 42 days and 10 days of unconsciousness, he was ready to name it.

"The disease of alcoholism," he says, choosing his words carefully. It's not a moral failure. It's not weakness. It's a disease—one that nearly killed him, and one he's now committing to address publicly, openly, in the hope that others recognizing themselves in his story might find the help he's found.