A cardinal sin for a Boston AA meeting, and presumably all AA meetings, is to get up on stage, and fall down the rabbit-hole of inviting the audience to “look-what-happened-to-poor-me”. I don’t think I deserve pity, nor am I asking for it, but it’s important to note that I acknowledge the angle that what I talk about may create that feeling, such is the subject matter. I understand this flaw, and I’m hoping by pointing it out up front, that I can burn it off at the start of this article, like a good flambé whose alcohol evaporates and leaves only what it should be consumable to the person.

A few weeks ago, nearly six of them, my Dad had a brain hemorrhage. It happened at work and then he walked, slack legged, by himself to the nearest general practitioner a few streets over from his office, and then proceeded to spend several hours in the emergency room by himself. He didn’t tell anyone in my family what was going on until five hours of tests were completed. He didn’t want to worry anyone. Even when the family turned up to visit him later, he was very dismissive and feigned the excuse that the presence of others stressed him out more than the situation required. Everyone went home. A second brain hemorrhage occurred.

The next morning in a waiting room that was more of a waiting area than room per sé, my Mom really annoyed me by saying “I hope you’re ready for what’s to come.” I was irrationally angry about this, because this isn’t something you can be ready for, regardless of the timeline involved. You can’t be ready for this. You can’t.

For the weeks that followed, we headed to a hospital on the other side of the city — a requirement due to the specialist nature of the trauma — and smiled politely at a less-than-lucid father as he lay in a hospital bed, and we did this from 3pm-4pm and 6pm-8pm, because those are the specified visiting hours, and as far as lessons go, you will learn quicker in a hospital than you will anywhere else in the world, that your circumstances are not unique, special or even all that unusual. This is a house of broken people, so if you fall in line, you can really understand the difference between special and lucky, and how no matter how dire your case may seem right now, you most certainly can be described as the latter.

During the 4pm-6pm break, I would sit in the back-seat of my Mom’s compact Ford Fiesta in a multi-storey car park and read ‘Infinite Jest’. This was how I kept up with the Infinite Winter reading group’s allotted schedule each week. I would put in headphones, and turn my iPod up loud to drown out my mother’s phone calls as she recanted the details of my father’s condition to her various brothers and sisters — which meant a hell of a lot of phone calls as my Mom’s family contained 15 children, a true example of the Irish Catholic lifestyle in the first half of last century, and each person would be told the same thing, and so I would turn my iPod up louder and I would focus harder on the text — sometimes to the extent of finger-on-the-page and mouthing along, because going in there to see my Dad once was hard enough, but reliving the instant replays during half-time was too much.

But I learned to Keep Coming, and that was key here, because while you can never be ready for this, you can trust the system. The only advice that doctors had for the family — in terms of what we could do to help his condition — was to be there each day to talk to him and stimulate his brain with activity and conversation. So I would get in the car, or get on the bus and the train (both were required if you weren’t going by car, such was the distance between home and hospital), and Keep Coming, and keep reading (even when I needed to finger-and-mouth the damn thing), and the pages went by, and for two hours in a hospital car park each day, a whole cast of characters invited me outside of my own world and into theirs, and gradually, the system — a thing that was not minor league enough for me to understand, but major league enough to work — did its thing. My Dad is at home now. My Dad is recovering. We all are.