Not long after the death of his son, Henry, the American comedian Rob Delaney attended a scuba-diving course with his wife, Leah. The course took place in a pool in Soho, London. Before students submerged, an instructor listed all the things that could go wrong, and warned that at least a few of them would panic. Delaney did not. Underwater, he thought of Henry, and of how much closer to him he felt 12ft below the surface. If Delaney were to die here, in a central London swimming pool, in some curious scuba accident, well, that would be OK. “We would share one more thing together,” he writes in A Heart That Works, a memoir that charts Henry’s illness and death, and the period of grief thereafter. “And that would be fucking great.”
Delaney, who is best known for co-writing and starring in the Channel 4 sitcom Catastrophe, is a tall man with a bright, winning smile and a comfortable, easy manner. We meet at an east London studio, where he is having his portrait taken, to discuss his book, and the many tragedies it records: the discovery of a brain tumour the “size of an apple” in Henry’s one-year-old head; the surgery that removed it, but which also left Henry severely disabled (“My beautiful fucked-up boy,” Delaney writes); the return of the tumour a year or so later, when Henry was living at home again, learning immeasurably despite hindrance, the youngest member of a riotous gang of Delaney brothers.
