RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
A quick heads up - today's episode includes a reference to suicide.
The actor Rob Delaney is a very funny guy. You know this if you've ever seen the hit show "Catastrophe," which he created and starred in with Sharon Horgan.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "CATASTROPHE")
ROB DELANEY: (As Rob Norris) Do you want to have dinner?
SHARON HORGAN: (As Sharon Morris) Do you want to have dinner?
DELANEY: (As Rob Norris) Yeah. That's why I asked.
HORGAN: (As Sharon Morris) OK. Do you have a wife or anything?
DELANEY: (As Rob Norris) No.
HORGAN: (As Sharon Morris) No. OK, well, I'll just - I'll write down my number.
DELANEY: (As Rob Norris) You know what? That's my work visa. So if you...
(SOUNDBITE OF PAPER RIPPING)
DELANEY: (As Rob Norris) Doesn't matter.
MARTIN: What you probably don't know is that while Rob Delaney was filming the last two seasons of "Catastrophe," he was going through the hardest experience of his life.
Tell me about Henry.
DELANEY: Well, Henry is my son, who died at the age of 2 years, 9 months. He was born in a birthing pool at the Whittington Hospital in North London and had an unremarkable first, say, 11 months of life.
MARTIN: Who did he look like?
DELANEY: Oh, more like my wife. My wife - so, as I understand it, men's sperm decides the gender of the kid, but - so that's all I've done. I've made - my body, against my mental wishes, has made all my children boys. But other than that, they all look like - my wife has way more powerful genes, so they're blond and fair, and...
MARTIN: Yeah. So Henry was sort of fair.
DELANEY: Yeah. He had blond hair and blue eyes - really special blue eyes, too. They were, like, light blue and dark blue. They kind of looked like a mosaic on a beautiful, I don't know, temple ceiling or something. They were so gorgeous.
MARTIN: Yeah.
DELANEY: And, yeah, he was amazing.
MARTIN: When Henry got sick, Rob says it felt like forever, waiting to hear what was wrong. And when they got the diagnosis, it was the worst kind of news - a cancerous brain tumor.
DELANEY: Then, you know, we got to learn more about him as he faced, you know, unbelievable adversity as a very young person. It was the greatest expenditure of effort and will and drive that I've ever seen in my life. I mean, I joke that he made Serena Williams and Albert Einstein look like garbage or something, like, just like, you know, dilettante kind of (vocalizing).
MARTIN: This is UP FIRST Sunday. I'm Rachel Martin, and today, I'm talking with Rob Delaney about grief - a grief so big words often fail. But Delaney found the ones he needed to tell his family's story, and it is raw, and it is honest. And somehow, despite all the sadness, it is also funny. Stay with us.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: Welcome back to UP FIRST Sunday. The title of Rob Delaney's memoir, "A Heart That Works," comes from a Juliana Hatfield song. The line goes, a heart that hurts is a heart that works, and while there's plenty of hurt in this story, there's also a thread of joy.
Did he think you were funny?
DELANEY: Yeah, he did. Yeah, he did think - he thought we're all - I mean, we're all - everybody in my house is funny. And, you know, my wife is hilarious, and his older brothers are funny. And he was funny. I mean, if somebody fart - I should have put this in the book. If somebody farted, he would do sign language for brown and point to the person. So he was super funny, yeah.
MARTIN: You wrote in the book that so much of what came after the diagnosis, all just - all the surgeries and the treatments and the hospital stays, all became like a fog, but that initial conversation with the doctor, when you found out his diagnosis, was seared in your mind.
DELANEY: Yeah.
MARTIN: Do you mind sharing the details of that?
DELANEY: Well, yeah. So there's sort of two horrible touchstone conversations. One is - it's Henry and me in his office, and he asked me a very curious question, which - he asked me if Henry's vomiting, which he was doing quite a bit of, was effortless, or was he retching? You know, the way that you or I might vomit after, you know, a night out, he - and it was effortless. I said, geez, that's a very interesting question. It's quite effortless. The contents of his stomach just come up and out. He's not bothered. And then, you know, the doctor - he got a very grave look on his face, and he said, OK, then I think we need to do an MRI of his head. And I said, why? Is there like something in there, like a tumor? And he said, I'm glad you said it. That's what he said to me.
And then a few days later, he had the MRI, and they assumed it would take a while, so they sent us to a little cafe, you know, next door to the hospital. And we sat down - you know, we just did what we were told and went there, and we sat down at a table. And I think we had ordered some Greek pastry or something. And then he ran in to the place, and he said, come with me now. And so we ran out. And he told us that, yes, in fact, they had found a big brain tumor right next to his brain stem. And we just were - you know, that was...
MARTIN: Yeah.
DELANEY: ...The moment. That was the moment that our lives changed forever.
MARTIN: Did they give you - in that conversation, did they give you a prognosis? When does that information start to come out?
DELANEY: No.
MARTIN: No.
DELANEY: They say, you know, it's here, it's in his - it's big. It's near a very important part of his brain. We've got to get it out. So they don't tell you - or rather, they didn't tell us, you know, it is likely a type of tumor called an ependymoma, which it was, that very frequently kills the people, particularly, you know, young children. If you're young, and you get one - and also your odds are a little worse if you're a boy, too. So they didn't say, you know, get ready for sort of a slow, painful descent into hell.
MARTIN: Right.
DELANEY: They kind of get you ready for each next step. So then after they got it out, they say, OK, yeah, this is what we feared it was. You know, we'll see what we can do, which - the surgeon was amazing. He got out all that - any - that the naked eye could see, that a microscope could see.
MARTIN: You have to start learning this whole new language, too, I bet.
DELANEY: Yeah.
MARTIN: I just can't imagine the overload of information that's coming at you.
DELANEY: Yeah, the amount of information is quite staggering. And then you think, oh, I went to college. You know, I - you know, I'll put it all together, collate it, figure out what the most important part is. But, you know, you kind of - it's sort of like learning on the battlefield.
MARTIN: You were working at the time, right?
DELANEY: It was actually - I was just in between seasons of the show "Catastrophe."
MARTIN: OK.
DELANEY: So it was right after Season 2. And so I did return to work. I did write Season 3 and film it with Sharon Horgan while Henry was in the hospital. What we did is we rented an office very close to Great Ormond Street Hospital where he was so that I could duck out as needed.
MARTIN: How did you do that? I mean, I...
DELANEY: How did I do that? Well, you look around the hospital, and you see that that's what other parents are doing.
MARTIN: Yeah.
DELANEY: You know, I mean, speaking practically, I mean, who cares? You know, sometimes people are cagey about this stuff, but we didn't really make much money on the first two seasons of "Catastrophe." It was only when it was a hit that they were like, oh, wait, this is - let's pay them some more. I couldn't afford not to work.
MARTIN: Yeah. Yeah.
DELANEY: I learned a lot about, like, working smarter rather than harder, as they say. On the first two seasons of "Catastrophe," I felt like I had to be across everything - you know, wardrobe, music, locations. And then for 3 and 4, I was like, nope, don't - all I care about is the scripts. Everything else - everybody's better at their respective jobs than I am of, you know, overseeing them, so why don't I just focus on making the script good with Sharon and everything else?
MARTIN: Could you escape into that role? Was it helpful in any way to have...
DELANEY: It was absolutely helpful. I wouldn't say it was like an escape, but it definitely - you know, like, endorphins were produced when we were thinking up a silly scenario to put our characters into or other characters. So I was very grateful for work, and...
MARTIN: I shouldn't have used the word escape. You cannot escape the fact that your child is dying.
DELANEY: No, but I know what you mean. Like, also - like, it's interesting, you know, what words we use are sort of less important than the meaning behind them, so I know what you mean. You know, and it's funny. You realize as words - like, I work in words, you know, and so do you, but then when the unthinkable happens, you realize the limits that words have. And then you realize, oh, it's what they're wrapped around that means the most, you know?
MARTIN: Yeah.
DELANEY: Which is why, you know, when people are like, what should I say to the person who lost a child or lost a sibling, you know? And, you know, or the spouse, or what should I say to the woman whose husband died while she was six months pregnant or whatever? And the answer is, it doesn't matter what you say, 'cause no words are going to help.
MARTIN: Yeah.
DELANEY: And that's OK. Don't be afraid of that fact, 'cause what is going to help is a casserole, a foot massage, you know, that type of thing. Going into their house, forcibly removing them from it, locking them out of their own home and making them go for a walk around the block while you play with their kids and, you know, take out the trash - that's what helps. That's what love is and looks like when people go through tragedy.
MARTIN: Delaney says what made a big difference in his ability to cope with what was happening to Henry was that there were two heads processing all of it and making the decisions, meaning him and his wife, Leah. The two of them leaned on each other hard and came through it together.
DELANEY: I think we just realized somehow, and I don't know how we knew, I really don't. This is one of those upsetting moments where I start to develop something similar to faith, which I find very frightening. And because it was something like grace that came into our home - and by home I mean our house and the two hospitals Henry bounced between. You know, we just knew. I don't know. My wife and I knew that if our relationship fell apart, then that would harm the other kids and Henry, and everybody needed each other. And everybody had their role to play, and we had to get his brothers into the hospital as often as possible. And we had to get home - as soon as he was well enough to come home for visits, at first, we did that right away.
And, you know, yeah, my wife and I went on dates. If one of our parents was able to visit, we would go on an overnight date. We'd go stay at a hotel near the hospital, you know? And maybe the hotel even had a pool, and then we would swim in it and kiss and fight. We'd have a fight. We'd go to a hotel for a date night, have a fight, make up, go to the hospital the next morning at 7. You know, it's just like, I don't know, great relationship - intrafamily relationship hygiene...
MARTIN: Yeah.
DELANEY: ...Was, like, the most - is how we survived, and made it - it made it better for Henry, for sure, and it definitely made it better for everybody else.
MARTIN: When we come back, Rob Delaney talks about why he prefers hanging out with people who can talk about the most horrible things in life and then pass the salt and pepper. That's after the break.
You're listening to UP FIRST Sunday. I'm Rachel Martin. Tragedies sometimes come in twos. So while Rob Delaney's son Henry was dying of a brain tumor, his brother-in-law, Tobias, died by suicide, which might have been too much to handle if it weren't for a kind of bond that Delaney describes between people with shared grief.
DELANEY: So I am one of two kids. I've got a sister who's five years younger, and when Henry was in the hospital getting chemo, my sister's wonderful husband died by suicide. And he was such a - just gorgeous soul. I mean, I was so happy when they got married because I was like, cool. I get to hang out with this guy a lot more, and I did. And you don't - that's not a guarantee when your sibling gets married.
MARTIN: Right.
DELANEY: You might, like, tolerate them. I mean, you might even not like them. But this guy was, like, thrilled - thrilled - always, to see him and hang out with him. And he got hit by depression that really, for me, changed the way that I look at it because he was a guy - like, he had a couple degrees from Harvard. So what? You know, he had a wonderful wife - one of the best wives around, my sister - you know, a beautiful daughter. And he did that. That's where his pain took him. And so - I mean, watching him die from depression was like - I mean, it really felt like watching one of the horsemen of the apocalypse gallop up to someone at speed and cut them down.
So - and that happened a little over a year before Henry died. So Henry's in the hospital getting chemo, and then my sister's husband dies terribly. And then not much later, my son dies. So my sister and I were hit by, you know, operatic levels of tragedy, you know, one right after the other. And that's terrible. Full stop.
MARTIN: Yeah.
DELANEY: New paragraph.
MARTIN: Right.
DELANEY: We now have a common language of grief and love and support that, you know, if we could push a button and make it all go away and back to the way things were, we would. But we now know that we can't, and so we have a very special relationship now. You know, I mean, it was good before, but now it's like - I don't know even how to describe it.
MARTIN: How - can you talk to me, Rob, about how that affects how you walk through the world and interact with other people? Like, I think you write about this in the book a little bit, about how difficult it is to sit with and engage with or develop relationships with people who have not gone through something really, really hard.
DELANEY: Yeah. So I'm most at ease and can sort of, like, exhale and relax around people who've been through horrific tragedy. Like, this morning I went swimming with a friend that I met from my bereaved parents group. And, you know, we had coffee afterwards. And we just are able to - we have a vocabulary to communicate with each other - and not a word vocabulary, but I guess more like an emotional history lexicon - to communicate and get it, you know what I mean? It's not like, you know, you see something behind somebody's eyes when I talk about Henry, you know, on a difficult day when I'm really missing him or, you know, I've had a painful memory, and there's just a tiny bit of static in the background of their emotional response, which is like, what the hell am I hearing? Please, God, may that never happen to me or anywhere near me, you know? Whereas, you know, my bereaved parent friend will be like, yeah, what a nightmare. Can you pass the pepper?
MARTIN: Yeah.
DELANEY: You know what I mean? And we just can get it. So - but of course I have close friends that I love desperately who haven't had horrible tragedy happen to them, and I love and treasure them. But it's easiest for all parties if, you know, it comes with at least a tacit acknowledgement from them that they're aware that their big tragedy hasn't happened yet.
MARTIN: Right.
DELANEY: You know?
MARTIN: Yeah. While Henry was in the hospital, Rob Delaney did his best to distract his son from his illness. They played and they read stories together, and sometimes they dozed off.
DELANEY: He would take a nap, and I would take a nap, and we would listen to this beautiful music in Icelandic.
MARTIN: Specifically, the Icelandic artist Asgeir. One of the tracks they played is called "Heimforin," or "Going Home."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HEIMFORIN")
ASGEIR: (Singing in Icelandic).
DELANEY: Only a couple years later, when I was telling an Icelandic director that I was working with, I was like, oh, you know, I am crazy about this guy Asgeir, and - or I was probably like Azz-gear (ph), and she's like, it's Asgeir. And I was like, yes, OK. And she told me, you know, the interesting thing about him is his father is a poet, and his father writes the lyrics and the son writes the music. And I was like, what? You know, I had no idea that this music that I listened to really in a sacred setting with Henry was the work of a father and son, as we were lying together, you know, dreaming, while he's hooked up to chemo at age 1, you know? So that was really special to learn that after the fact and made me - made me what? - I don't know, vibrate inside and ring like a bell. Felt really beautiful to learn that.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: Despite the surgeries and the chemo, the tumor came back. At a certain point, Rob and his wife decided that any more treatment was just going to do more harm than good. So eventually, they took Henry home, and they spent his last few weeks together as a family.
You said in the book that you couldn't write about the moments before or after Henry died, but that you could talk about them. So, of course, I seize on that and I ask if it is OK if I ask you a question about right after Henry died.
DELANEY: You may ask it. Yeah, we'll see if I'll answer it, but feel free to ask.
MARTIN: What do you remember about the room? What sensations do you remember? It's a very sacred thing.
DELANEY: Yeah. Well, yeah, sacred crossed...
MARTIN: Maybe that's not the right word.
DELANEY: No, no, it certainly is. It's one of the right words. It's sacred. You can't believe it, you know? It's - it would be the equivalent of, like, I don't know, witnessing some unbelievable historic event or something.
MARTIN: Yeah.
DELANEY: Like, you know you're seeing something. You know you're being changed dramatically in the moment. You know that it is a dividing line in your life. Well, I mean, I looked at Henry and - I mean, he looked so beautiful. He looked so beautiful. And being around a dead body, any dead body, is quite something 'cause they're different from alive bodies in some pretty fascinating ways. You know, a body with no motion. I mean, if you watch someone sleep, there's motion - you know? - the rising of the chest, you know, turn the head a little bit, you know, scratch something. I mean, no motion at all - that's different.
You know, then you read the body. It's like, wow. It's all these ingredients, you know? And they move differently. There's no reflexes. And it's your son - you know? - who - he died on our couch, and he - you know, he used to pull himself up on that couch and cruise. He never made it to walking because of the disability from the surgery. He looked like he was getting ready to walk. You know, his cruising was getting quite advanced. And he appeared poised to be walking soon, but then the tumor came back. And...
MARTIN: So he lived a good chunk of his life on that couch.
DELANEY: Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You know - yeah. I mean, he was breastfed on that couch. He played with his brothers on that couch. He napped on it - you know, all kinds of things. And then he lay dead on it. And, yeah, his brothers woke up not too long after and came up and saw him. And they were so young. They were 3 and 5, and they were our big boys, as we called them. I mean, they're not even big now. They're 9 and 11. That's not even big. And - but they were tiny, tiny baby boys, and they were seeing their brother that they loved so much and that they'd taken such incredible care of. So they spent time with his body, too. And it was - you know, I'm really glad we did that. I - really, really glad.
MARTIN: How are your kids doing? You have another kid.
DELANEY: Yeah. Yeah, we had another baby boy - another boy. Yeah. Six months after Henry died, his brother was born in the same room that Henry died in. And oh, my God, that room. We had to move out of that house because the boys that we do have keep getting larger, and we weren't fitting in it. And so we moved.
MARTIN: What was that like?
DELANEY: And I said - you know, it's interesting. I really was scared to move because I thought that that place - I mean, it is. That place is so sacred to us. I was really scared to move, but the fact is, is when once we did move, Henry's brothers came with us. Henry's mom came with us. You know, I came with us, with all my memories of Henry. So it's been - I've been OK in our new home. That said, when we did leave, I said to the landlord - I said, can you do me a favor? If you ever go to sell this place, could you let me know first? And he said yes. So maybe, hopefully, you know, in 50 years I can waddle in there and die myself and then not tell anybody, and then they'll find me some months later and it'll be haunted, and maybe it could be a museum of sadness.
MARTIN: Perfect.
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: Do you have a concept for what happens to us after we die?
DELANEY: Well, I talk about it in the book about - I think we're like glasses of individual water. You know, the glass itself is maybe - is it this body? Is the glass an illusion? But, yeah, I mean, water's, I think, a good metaphor. And I think we get poured back into a sea. You know, like, when we were born, we - or conceived or whatever - we're scooped out of the water and think we're separate or made of different stuff, maybe, for a while, and then we get poured back in. So I think after we die, I think, you know, yeah, I think I'll be with Henry again, but he won't be Henry as I know him and I won't be, you know, his dad as he knew him. We'll all be mingled together, wondering who's who and, you know, taking different forms and nebulae and dancing through the cosmos and evolving and changing. So I think, you know, we're ingredients in the big stew and we'll be mixed into, you know, I don't know, dinner for some cosmic Godzilla. I don't know.
(LAUGHTER)
DELANEY: You know? And he, in turn, will metabolize us and then, you know, belch us into his next, you know, incarnation. I don't know.
MARTIN: I mean, I think that sounds perfect. I think that sounds perfect.
DELANEY: Yeah. And so I think that's what happens. And I'd stake a claim to that. I'd sign my name to that.
MARTIN: The book is called "A Heart That Works." Rob Delaney, thank you so much for talking with us.
DELANEY: Thank you. I've really enjoyed this conversation.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: This episode of UP FIRST Sunday was produced by Lee Hale with help from Olivia Hampton, Reena Advani, Shelby Hawkins and Liana Simstrom. If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. We'll be back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, enjoy the rest of your Sunday.
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