A Heart That Works

by Rob Delaney

One is such an amazing age. Most one-year-olds can do almost everything an adult can, except use a toilet and talk. AND they haven’t yet started the phase of toddlerhood where they’re willful or even a little bit naughty. They’re genuinely very fun and interesting, but they’re still wildly needy and will allow you to cuddle them and kiss them literally all day if you need to. Nothing but nothing is more joyous than a one-year-old.

I hesitate to give advice, but I have to say that if you’re ever in a situation like the one in which my family found ourselves, do not forget to love, touch, and look into the eyes of every other family member regularly.

Checking in with her is critical for me, and the same goes for her. I wish fate hadn’t given each of us the exact necessary qualifications to genuinely and substantively help each other, but it did, and we use them. What a fascinating cunt of cosmic symmetry. When one of us cries to the other, we don’t try to fix it; we don’t stammer platitudes. We just listen and hold.

I have been humbled by Henry’s sickness and death, and I know damn well that I can’t stop kids from dying. But I know who can make a dying kid smile and laugh and feel loved and focused on and cared for. And I like giving them money to do that. I guess I feel that the people who are inspired to raise money to fight cancer are doing a great job at it. And my job, as I see it, is to make sure other dying kids and their families get the same joy that we and Henry got from Rainbow Trust and Noah’s Ark. It would be accurate to say that I feel called to do so.

I preach sympathy in lots of situations, but not this one. Perhaps because my sympathy wouldn’t do anything. Life, and death, will kick their own door down soon enough; I don’t really know that a lecture from me on how they’re a coward would help. So, Rachel, thank you for gasping in pain and sadness when you learned Henry would die. In the years since, I think of it often as the absolute best response I received. It helped me, Rachel. YES, SCREAM IT FROM the rooftops. My beautiful baby boy is going to die.

Or maybe the grief is a mad king whose dirty robe sweeps up nettles and rocks and shells and stray cutlery and shit and misunderstandings with Miras, and drags them all through your house and tracks them on your bed and your walls and ceilings. You really can’t even imagine the compound horrors that build up around the dying and the death itself and threaten to choke you. So much is poisoned.

My favorite historical response to someone hearing about a “big” death comes from the character Henry Clerval in Mary Shelley’s masterwork, Frankenstein. When Henry learns that his best friend Victor Frankenstein’s young brother William has been murdered, he says, “I can offer you no consolation, my friend. Your disaster is irreparable. What do you intend to do?” Perfect. There is no consolation. The disaster is irreparable. I’ve read Frankenstein twice since our Henry died. It is my companion in grief. It should surprise no one who reads it that Mary Shelley was a bereaved mother.