A Heart That Works

by Rob Delaney

when we are under water in blackness, we are some type of alone, whether we’re being stared at or not.

And I genuinely believe, whether it’s true or not, that if people felt a fraction of what my family felt and still feels, they would know what this life and this world are really about.

That is one thing grief does to me. It makes me want to make you understand. It makes me want you to understand. I want you to understand. But you, statistically, cannot. You forget that my son died. Then you remember. Then you forget again.

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 listen to it and think, ‘That’s how I feel inside,’ so why not accept that and listen to music that helps me find some equilibrium between my interior and my exterior?

Everyone uses the NHS, but not everyone uses social care. Thus it’s easier to cut its funding without angering a critical mass of people.

In between Henry’s birth and his death was, of course, his life. That was my favourite part. Henry led a hell of a life.

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.

We became receptacles for people’s varied responses.

says, ‘I can offer you no consolation, my friend. Your disaster is irreparable. What do you intend to do?’

Loving him meant we had to let the cancer spread and kill him.

I suppose I think we have a rainbow of emotions. I don’t know which colour corresponds to which emotion; perhaps blue is sadness, red is passion, and so on. That doesn’t so much matter. I still have all the colours in my rainbow after Henry’s death. Name an emotion: I can still feel it, and often do. 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.

The fatigue of grief is fucking staggering.

Rather, I suspect I am a glass of water, and when I die, the contents of my glass will be poured into the same vast ocean that Henry’s glass was poured into, and we will mingle together forever. We won’t know who’s who. And you’ll get poured in there one day, too.