My husband observed the mammoth pile of discarded tissues next to Rob Delaney’s memoir, A Heart That Works, and asked, “Why do you do this to yourself?” The same question was asked when I watched Ricky Gervais’s After Life, read Yanagihara’s A Little Life, and actually, the list goes on and on. I cry to the point of a migraine. I don’t really know why I go back for more.

So, if you are planning on picking up Delaney’s memoir about the time during which his one-year-old son, Henry, was diagnosed with a brain tumour and then died, know that it is devastating, humorous in parts, confronting and beautifully written with unflinching honesty.

Much of Delaney’s grief is expressed as anger, and that anger sits alongside his sense of humour. For some readers, the humour will take the edge off the anger. For others (including myself), the humour is seen as another layer of the anger. Either way, it’s a roller-coaster. You’re crying, you’re laughing, you’re wondering how in the world he held it together.

If you think you’ve praised your child for a job well done, I wish you could have seen Leah or me go bananas in support of Henry picking up a cup from the floor and placing it on a low table, while kneeling. Einstein and Serena Williams can fuck off; Henry was a true achiever.

On news of Henry’s prognosis, Delaney’s father-in-law cries, “I wish it was me instead of Henry,” and Delaney responds, “We do too, Richard.” They laugh through their tears, but it hits on something that is rarely articulated – a sense of what is just and fair in the order of life. Toward the end of the book, Delaney reflects further, saying that the experience gave him ‘…the odd sensation of somehow being older than my parents, or at the very least having seen something that they hadn’t, and it had changed me.’

A significant part of Delaney’s story is about the people around him. Delaney and his family found the language for what was happening, but others could never know that language and as a result, some people comforted them and others (often inadvertently) did not. In this respect, Delaney is self-aware about how grief had altered him. He’s furious when a man tries to comfort him by telling of his own experience (that his grandfather had survived a brain tumour) –

Are you fucking kidding me? I wouldn’t care if your ninety-year-old grandfather got hit by three buses and then fell in a meat grinder! Grandfathers are supposed to get tumours and die! That’s their job! What kind of shitty-ass grandfather isn’t walking around loaded with tumours? Not one I want to meet. Grandparent deaths are like practice deaths, a step above pet deaths, to help you have the barest preparation for a truly painful death. And this guy’s grandfather didn’t even have the decency to die! What a pair of arseholes.

And –

…the reason I can’t be around adults celebrating their birthdays is because my little boy only got to have two of them. If you’ve had FUCKING FORTY of them, I think you can relax. I’m so awful. If I’m at work and someone whispers, ‘Hey, we’re doing cake and ice cream for Chris’s birthday at four!’ I will go take a shit at 3.57.

He clearly identifies the fact that his grief is now a part of him. This is significant as many people who are grieving ask, “When does this feeling go away?” and are devastated to learn that grief doesn’t ‘go away’ (the pain associated with it eases, but the grief, no – rather we ‘adjust’ to it, incorporate it). As Delaney describes, the grief ‘…colours the happy moments now, the milestones.’

I now love it when people bring up Henry. If they worry, I assure them they’re not really ‘bringing him up’ at all; I was probably already thinking about him anyway.

Sometimes, in therapy, you don’t steer a person toward finding the hope or remembering a time when they didn’t feel the way they currently do. Instead, you acknowledge the deep suffering and sit in the trenches with them. Delaney captures this in a way that I have not come across anywhere else.

…I now find it difficult to truly and fully relax around people who haven’t had some significant tragedy and pain in their lives. Just another one of the many things that make me a fun hang.

I always have the same internal debate over writing reviews of memoirs, particularly grief memoirs – because, who am I to judge? But the other part says that this person is sharing their experience and wants to be heard. Delaney’s message is clear – he wants people to understand, or at the least, try to understand his family’s pain. So I settle on identifying the bits that made me listen. And the bits that replay in my mind for weeks or months after I’ve closed the book. And I know that for many who are in the depths of grief, reading about another person’s experience can help normalise their own. And that’s a helpful thing.

5/5