Actor Rob Delaney 'started with anger,' ended with 'love' writing book about 2-year-old son's death

Rob Delaney has written a book about something parents don't even want to imagine: the death of his child – the “very clever and curious and funny and mischievous” Henry – who didn’t live to see his third birthday.

The third of the “Catastrophe” star and co-creator’s four sons with wife Leah Delaney died nearly five years ago following a battle with brain cancer.

In his new memoir “A Heart That Works” (Spiegel & Grau, 196 pp., out now), Delaney remembers learning of the apple-sized tumor crowding then 1-year-old Henry’s head, a successful surgery eclipsed by the cancer’s return, and the decision to forgo a treatment plan he and Leah predicted Henry wouldn’t survive. “Loving him meant we had to let the cancer spread and kill him,” Delaney writes.

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On Jan. 19, 2018, Delaney’s 41st birthday, Henry looked into his loving mother’s eyes once more and died.

The book – which borrows its title from singer Juliana Hatfield's belief that "A heart that hurts is a heart that works" – is dedicated to “Henry’s mommy.”

“It's weird because she spent more time with Henry than I did, and I'm the famous guy who wrote the book and people are going like, ‘Hey, good for you, good book,’” he says in an interview. “But Henry didn't grow in my womb. I didn't breastfeed him. She did both those things, and she was in hospital with him when I was at work… I do my absolute best to convey how amazing my wife was and is in the book, but I do feel odd that the reader is getting my version of events.”

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When Delaney, now 45, began writing the book in February, he was understandably filled with anger.

"You wish you could take a kitchen knife and stick it into yourself near one of your shoulders and pull it down and across to the hip on the opposite side of your torso," he writes of his grief. "Then you’d tear apart skin, fat, muscle, and viscera, and pull your child out of you again and kiss them and hold them and try frantically to fix what you couldn’t fix the first time. But that wouldn’t work. So you sit there like a decaying disused train station while freight train after freight train overloaded with pain roars through you."

“I'm glad that I began it honestly, from a place of anger and hurt,” Delaney says, “because then I think the somewhat of a transformation occurs organically throughout the book, that even the book's author, me, isn't doing on purpose or on a schedule. As the book came out of me – (it) started with anger and left with a lot of love, which was a surprise to me.”

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Remembering Henry, whose blue eyes Delaney writes were "two of the most glorious things" his dad had seen, replaced that ire with love.

“When I was with him for the two years and nine months of his life – of course there were times of anger – but it was always balanced by the fact that I could hold him and kiss him and smell him,” says Delaney. “So if I'm even just talking about Henry, the ratio is going to be like, yeah there's anger, sadness, grief. But the bigger percentage is going to be love.”

The book has humor in it too, a natural for the standup. "I think it would've been a pretty miserable book if there wasn't humor in it,” Delaney says.

“In my house, where I've got three kids who were alive and the ashes of one who's dead on a shelf, and my wife, we laugh here a lot,” he says. “Henry was funny. His brothers are extremely funny. His mom is a riot.

"We laugh a lot and we laughed throughout," he continues. “Yeah, we cried a lot too, and there were times where we thought we would go insane from grief. But laughter, I guess we require it.”

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Writing the book and doing interviews about it are difficult, but Delaney hopes “A Heart That Works” will help parents and siblings who have suffered a similar loss. He’s also pledged his earnings to children’s hospices.

“I know I've benefited from my bereaved parents groups that I go to,” he says. “So if I am honest about my experience with somebody whose kid died three weeks ago or six months ago, that's going to help them. I know having the book out there is good. Aspects of getting the book out there are painful for me, but I'm willing to do it to get the book to people who need it.”

For those facing a similar tragedy, he suggests connecting with other bereaved parents.

“If you can go to a formal bereaved parents meeting, do so because those people can help you unlike anybody else,” he says. “There are people who can help you during these darkest times, and the people who can do (so) best are the people who are a little further along the same path. So find them, and they'll help you. And then one day you'll be able to help people too.”

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Rob Delaney started book on son's death, 'A Heart That Works,' angry