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.
Henry died in January 2018, on Delaney’s 41st birthday. A Heart That Works is meant to reach other bereaved parents, with whom he spends a lot of time. “I’ve spoken about Henry before,” he says, reclining now on a couch. “And I’ve written about him, and I’ve talked on the radio about him. And every time I have, people have responded in ways that are unique to anything I’ve ever done.” When, in 2018, Delaney self-published his first essay about Henry, it went viral. (It begins, “I’m on the bus to go see my son Henry at the hospital,” and what follows is an emotional sucker punch.) Much of what he wrote then, in the middle and immediate aftermath of tragedy, ended up in the book.
Delaney speaks of Henry openly, with a jaunty smile. He doesn’t bristle at painful questions. He considers talking about his son to be an outlet – he wants to talk about his son – though often while we’re together he pauses mid-conversation and, seeming to recall a memory, hugs himself tightly with both arms. Early in our conversation, he points at my phone case, where I keep a passport photo of my six-year-old, and asks, “Is that your child?”
“Yes,” I say.
He nods.
“You know, I’d like to see Henry and your son play together,” he says, fondly. “That’s not going to happen. I’d like for Henry to play with anybody. And when I think that, it makes me really sad.” We sit briefly in silence. Then he adds, “I want to smell him.”
Earlier in the day, Delaney had looked after a friend’s baby so she could go for swim, and for a while they lay together on the floor, the baby and Delaney, Delaney letting the weight of the baby’s head press down on his own. This is a thing he used to do with Henry, and a thing he would like to do with him now. Sometimes he will dream of Henry. Often the dreams will involve Henry as a brilliant, disabled two-year-old boy shuffling along the floor, and Delaney will wake up both happy and sad because he has been visited by his son and his son is no longer here. Emotions like these were once new and shocking to him, but are now more commonplace. Still, sometimes he can be making his way through the day and be suddenly reminded of the terrible thing that happened. “I’ll repeat it to myself out loud,” he says. “The circumstances of his symptoms, the discovery of his illness, that he didn’t get better, that he died.”
Like Catastrophe, which laughs at and celebrates the messiness of married life, A Heart That Works is tragicomic, a jumble of joy and fear and laughter and pain. Readers will relate to Delaney’s willingness to ignore what is commercially palatable, particularly in the arena of grief writing, which can be saccharine and meme-y, and to instead report on distress candidly, in a way that is often frank and bleakly funny. In one scene, Delaney recalls an emotionally desperate moment that ended with him and Leah in tears. Delaney’s father-in-law, Richard, who was visiting, attempted to comfort the couple. “I wish it was me instead of Henry,” Richard said, to which Delaney replied, “We do too, Richard.”
Delaney has been surprised by conversations he’s had with people who’ve read early drafts. “I’m hearing a lot of words like ‘love’ and ‘warmth’ and ‘hope’ and ‘beauty’,” he says, eyebrows raised. “And it’s funny, because I sat down to write this book thinking, How can I hurt people? I wanted to offload some pain, I wanted to spread it around, I wanted to bruise people’s psyches and hearts. Not because I hate people. I don’t. I like them! But I thought that the best thing to do was to write a book that would just brutalise people, and then walk away with no salve, no hope.”
“As an act of kindness?” I ask.
Sensing my skepticism, he says, “I thought the kindest thing to do would be to drop a bomb on anybody who read the book, so that they would know the horror, and thereby gain a better relationship with truth and reality. Then, as I was writing the book, as I think is often the case, I realised, Oh, this is going to say something different to what I thought it would. There is ferocious anger, no question. But, and I almost want to cry saying this, my love and my wife’s love and my kids’ love for Henry was so powerful that it seemed to wash that stuff, not away, but if that anger and hate and fear was like dirt in our hair, the rinsing, nourishing properties of love worked through it.”
Delaney thinks of grief as a shifting experience: painful, lately more manageable, ever-present. In the immediate aftermath of Henry’s death, there was intolerable horror. Now he describes grief as being “weaved into our lives”. He uses the metaphor of a rainbow: colour remains, but now there is an extra band, of black. “We have a new capacity for something painful,” he says. “We have a new vocabulary.” In the months after Henry died, Delaney went to sleep each night unsure if his body had the strength or desire necessary to wake itself up again. I sense he wouldn’t have minded if it didn’t. Now he feels “sufficiently curious about my family and the world at large to believe that I could wake up. I mean, I might not…” His tone shifts. “I smile first when I think about Henry. Now, when I hear his name, I feel happy. Is there still grief? Yes, of course. Can I execute my appointed tasks for the day? Yes, I can.”
When Henry died, Leah was pregnant with the couple’s fourth son, Teddy. Though the boys never met, Teddy speaks of Henry often. “He’s four now,” Delaney says, “and he asks questions like, ‘Did Henry have a teddy bear like I do?’ Or, ‘Did Henry kiss mummy’s tummy when I was in there?’ Sometimes he says things like, ‘I don’t want him to be dead.’ And to that we say, ‘Yeah, neither do we.’”
Delaney’s older boys, Eugene and Oscar, were six and four when Henry died. Often it was the boys who showed their parents how to go on being. “You don’t learn anything between childhood and adulthood that makes you better equipped for this. And the idea that you can shield your children from it…” He shakes his head. “There’s nothing you can handle that a kid can’t. It’s kind of funny that we’re like, ‘No, we should try to keep this from the kids.’ Because then you’re going to be exhibiting some weird, stunted behaviour. And they’re going to be, like, ‘What’s wrong with Dad?’ Rather than, ‘Dad’s sad because our brother died.’ I’m so grateful to Henry’s brothers, to what they did and how they did it.’
I ask, “What sort of things did they do?”
“They asked childish questions,” he says. “ ‘Why are you crying?’ Because Henry’s tumour came back. ‘Is he going to die?’ Yes. ‘How will he die?’ These were questions that were useful to think about. We said something like, ‘Well, something that shouldn’t be in his head is going to crowd out the stuff that should be and slowly start to shut it off.’ ‘Is there anything they can do?’ No, there isn’t.” After a pause, he adds, “I’d feel bad for the parent who’s like, ‘Not now sweetheart, I can’t talk about this.’ I can understand not wanting to talk about it. You’re not filled with pleasant physical sensations when you answer these questions. But it’s a pretty good idea for you to hold hands with that kid and walk them through it together.”
In A Heart That Works, Delaney likens being a bereaved parent to living on a lunar outpost: you remain a member of the human race, but your life is notably different to that of those left on Earth. “We’ve been through something most people haven’t,” Delaney says. “Statistically.” Sometimes Delaney will listen to the concerns or fears of other people and realise they don’t register with him as worthy of the level of upset those people are expressing. “I can feel, like, ‘Yes, what you’re describing isn’t pleasant,’” he says, “but perhaps you might be better served grappling with the fact that there are worse things that can happen.”
When I ask how those conversations go, he says, “I do listen.”
“You listen,” I say.
“I’ll offer my input,” he says. “But sometimes my advice might be a little harsh. Like, ‘Oh, there’s a billing issue with your office?’”
When Henry was one and very unwell, Delaney’s brother-in-law killed himself, an event Delaney describes in A Heart That Works as “a fascinating cunt of cosmic symmetry”, and which – he’s right – seems plainly worse than the billing issue with your office. He and his sister have become mutually supportive. “Granted, it’s her husband who died and it was my son,” he says, “but we both loved each other’s respective guy-who-died.” When I ask what their relationship might look like had they not both been “walloped by things you would never see coming,” he says, “I guess there would be distance between us. We’d still have things in common, but I would have to explain.” Now they suffer together. “I wish it weren’t that way. I wish one of us was like, ‘Holy shit, I can’t imagine your pain.’ But no. I guess we take what we’re given.”
In Jackie, Delaney’s 2019 standup special, named for the Delaney family’s beloved bearded dragon, he says, “If the NHS was a dick, I would suck that dick,” a line redolent of his steadfast support for public healthcare and his gift for profanity. (This is the kind of quip that might appear on his Twitter feed, to the tee-hees of 1.5m followers.) Henry spent 14 months in two London hospitals, seven in each. Delaney counted 13 nurses at his memorial service. In A Heart That Works, he recalls fondly the huge amount of time the family spent on wards, visiting, learning, and he delights at the remarkable commitment of healthcare workers, many of them young volunteers, who dedicated themselves fully to the care of a disabled two-year-old they’d only recently met.
Delaney moved to the UK when he was 37, with his wife and two older sons, to work on Catastrophe. He is contemptuous of healthcare in the US. “The idea of going to get medical care, of securing it for yourself and your family, comes with stomach-curdling fear.” But of the NHS he says, “You’ve got a thing here that is ostensibly the same in every community in the UK, from top to bottom,” which “unifies everybody in practice and in spirit and which creates a kind of national acknowledgment that we’re born with these imperfect bodies that are going to fail in various ways and there’s no getting around that.”
Delaney is appalled by attempts to privatise public healthcare. “You’re just putting on a thing whose only job is to siphon money away from it, and into the pockets of CEOs and C-suite wankers and investors,” he says. “Why? They add nothing. Literally nothing. They don’t deliver care more efficiently. Any idiot can figure that out. So why build an office tower full of assholes in between you and your healthcare? It’s a disgusting operation. Any building related to private healthcare needs to be razed, and the earth where it stood needs to be salted.” In A Heart That Works, Delaney writes: “The growing number of politicians and newspaper-owners who aim to privatise the NHS need to fuck off 10 times, then gargle a big bowl of diarrhoea.”
Delaney wrote the third series of Catastrophe while Henry was in hospital, experiencing NHS care. (He and Sharon Horgan, his co-writer, relocated to offices to be closer to Henry’s ward.) He agreed to write the fourth series after he discovered Henry was going to die, “because I knew I’d have to make money somehow, at some point”. When they began, Delaney didn’t care about the series’ quality. “To me it was literally a pay cheque and some continuity.” But he quickly realised “work and grief were compatible”. Horgan, he says, was sensitive throughout. “It was, like, a healthy work environment to be in. If I had to go cry, I could go cry. Sometimes I’d just sit there and cry.”
Delaney had always written parts of his true self into the show. His character, Rob, is a recovering alcoholic, as the real Delaney is. (Delaney has been sober 20 years.) In the fourth series, Rob admits to hating birthdays, as Delaney does. (In A Heart That Works he marvels at the impudence of adults who celebrate their birthdays, while his son was only alive long enough to experience two.) Catastrophe was named for a line in Zorba the Greek: “I’m a man, so I married. Wife, children, house, everything. The full catastrophe.” Throughout the show, Horgan and Delaney work through one muddle after another, in such a way that viewers come to recognise it is not just the moments between the chaos but the chaos itself that constitutes a life, a theme that runs through his book. Though series four does not feature the death of a child, viewers will recognise Delaney’s emotional state in its dialogue. “It’s OK to be angry,” Rob says in an early episode. “Life is shitty.”
Of all the lessons Delaney learned from experiencing the death of a child, this might be the one that pops up most readily. Now he puts it another way: “Life involves a lot of suffering” – a knowing smirk – “as elucidated by the Buddha.” Suffering is a state he is learning to accept. “Better to acknowledge it,” he says. “Let it in, let it hurt, so you can work through it. Because to say, ‘I don’t want that. I’m not going to let that happen. I’m going to lead a life where I keep pain and suffering at bay…’ Well, then you’re in trouble.”
“Understanding that we’ll suffer,” I say. “How does that help?”
“Well, that’s the first step,” he says. “One thing I would say with confidence is that we don’t do grief, grief does us. It’s going to come through you if someone you love desperately dies, and it’s not up to you when it strikes. But if you understand that a storm is coming, and you feel it beginning inside of you, it’s a real waste of time to fight it. Let the weather pattern emerge. Cry if you need to.”
He points at the door, through which he will soon leave so he can begin the afternoon school run.
“In the building we’re in right now I know there are three toilets,” he goes on. “I just went downstairs and used one. And if I needed to go barf or cry for a while, and as a result I had to blow my nose and wash my face, I know I could go there. I could excuse myself and go do that and come back and we could continue.” I watch a small smile form. “It would be better than me having an aneurism trying not to feel the emotions,” he goes on. “You’d be like, ‘Is he OK? Did he eat something?’ Fuck it. I’m sad. I’m going to cry.”
A Heart That Works by Rob Delaney is published by Coronet at £16.99. Buy a copy for £14.78 from guardianbookshop.co.uk
