When Rob Delaney’s beautiful, bright boy Henry died at the age of two, he did what any devastated parent would do – he punched himself in the face.
“I don’t know why I did it, but I did it hard enough that my nose bled,” he recalls. “A hospice worker was at our house, helping our family. She turned to my worried mom and said, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s normal. Don’t worry about that.’”
It’s just one of the deeply personal insights the actor and writer shares in his new book, A Heart That Works, which details what it’s like to watch one of your children die – and how you learn to function afterwards.
Henry had been losing weight rapidly due to repeated vomiting, and on April 27 2016, doctors told Delaney they suspected a brain tumour was to blame. The night before, he and co-writer Sharon Horgan had won a Bafta for their hit-show, Catastrophe.
The memoir follows everything that happened next, and how Delaney and his wife, Leah, muddled through to support their two older boys, Oscar and Eugene, who were just four and six when their brother died.
Remembering a child you’ve lost is bittersweet
“It’s wonderful, and it hurts,” Delaney writes of recalling memories of his son.
“I think about him as a little baby, and I think about him as a toddler. I think about the expressions he used to make, and his hands and feet and legs. I think about Henry’s hair, every single day.”
One of emotions we rarely hear spoken about honestly in relation to grief, is the intense anger that can follow.
“I get mad when I think about how beautiful he was, and it’s offensive to me,” says Delaney. “His hair, his face, his eyes that were such a bright blue. It makes me angry that people won’t get to look at them. Those eyes were two of the most glorious things I’ve ever seen and it off ends me that they’re not there for people to gaze into. It’s fucked.”
Parenting other children when your kid is sick is a constant juggle
Throughout the book Delaney talks about the realities of looking after three children under five when one is sick. The juggle is never more evident than when he recalls the time Henry contracted sepsis and was rushed to Great Ormond Street.
Henry’s Hickman line (the permanent port through which doctors delivered chemo) was identified as the source of the infection and the decision was quickly made to remove it.
“Once we settled on that game plan, Leah dashed off to run Eugene’s sixth birthday party at the local leisure centre, and I stayed with Henry,” he recalls. “That’s division of labour when you have multiple kids and one has cancer.”
He cried when he filmed his CBeebies bedtime story
In 2018, Delaney became the first star to perform a CBeebies Bedtime Story using Makaton – a language that uses signs (gestures) and symbols (pictures) to help people communicate.
He learned Makaton to communicate with Henry when he could no longer talk. In the book, he reveals he cried on set when reading a line in Ten in a Bed by Penny Dale – on of Henry’s favourites.
“The producer said we could take a break if I wanted to, and I said no, I am crying because I miss my son Henry. I learned Makaton for him and now he’s dead. So I am going to take a few deep breaths and we can continue filming,” he says.
“I didn’t mean that to chastise a lovely person for humanely and very understandably offering me a break; I just knew that disabled kids and their families deserved their first Makaton Bedtime Story, and it was our job to get it on the air.”
Having another child after bereavement is a joy
Leah gave birth to their fourth son, Teddy, a few months after Henry died. Although there are mixed emotions associated with welcoming a new child into the family when you’ve just buried another, Delaney shares how much happiness this brought him.
“I’m wild about him, and when I think about him growing in the same womb as Henry, I’m so happy,” he says. “I had a dream one night that Henry left a message for him in my wife’s womb. And it was in a little picture frame, complete with a little nail; Henry nailed it into her uterus. And I couldn’t read it – it wasn’t for me to read – but I knew that our new baby saw that, and I woke up and it made me feel happy.”
In time, grief sits alongside happiness
Henry’s story is tragic, but there are moments on the page that’ll make readers laugh out loud. Delaney is keen to show that grief doesn’t disappear, but it can sit alongside joy.
“Leah and our boys and I laugh every day. But now there’s a band of black in my rainbow, too, which wasn’t there before. Or if it was there, I couldn’t see it before Henry died,” he writes. “It’s a part of me now. And it should be.”
A Heart That Works by Rob Delaney is published on October 20, 2022. You can see Rob on book tour at Manchester Literature Festival (October 19), Royal Festival Hall, London, in conversation with Cariad Lloyd of Griefcast (Oct 20), and Toppings, Edinburgh, in conversation with Frankie Boyle (Oct 21).