Rob Delaney's son was two when he died. He wants you to understand how it feels.

The following is an excerpt from A Heart That Works by Rob Delaney, a visceral and deeply personal memoir by the star of the Amazon Prime series Catastrophe, about love, loss, and fatherhood.

I swim most days now in a pond near our house. There are ponds of various sizes scattered around London, and I’m lucky to live near enough to a couple of them that I can run or cycle a short distance and get wet in a natural body of water. My favourite pond is managed by the city, and if you attend a short briefing, give them eight pounds, and put on an orange swim cap, they let you have at it. It’s roughly one mile across and ringed by tower blocks and newer, shinier residential buildings. One time, a heron carrying a dead frog in its mouth flew over me as I swam. I went home and told my four-year-old, and he started crying and told me that the frog was his friend.

Had you told me even five years ago that I would be a habitual swimmer in a body of water that was not the ocean, I wouldn’t have believed you. I grew up next to the ocean, at the beach as often as possible, or sailing around the little islands off Marblehead, Massachusetts, in a tiny little sailing boat called a Widgeon. So the ocean was not a problem for me, but I’ve spent most of my life afraid of lakes and ponds. Frankly, I wasn’t even crazy about pools.

The way I intellectualised it was that if something killed me in the ocean, I would understand what had happened; there would be no mystery. My autopsy would read ‘shark attack’ or ‘run down by drunken teenager in a Boston Whaler and hacked apart by engine blades’. It would be awful, but anyone who read the report would understand what had happened. Whereas if I met my end in a lake or pond, that would AT BEST mean that sentient vines had reached up from the pond floor and coiled around my thighs and waist and pulled me down, not even allowing me to scream because they’d tightened around my throat and crushed my larynx. Or, more likely, that the gas bloated zombie-corpse of a murdered postman had slipped a rusty handcuff around my ankle and was going to yank me down and make me be his wife for eternity.

Better the devil you know – which, in my case, was sharks and drunk teenagers. I suppose I thought dying in the ocean was just the cost of doing business, whereas dying in a lake meant you could only have been murdered by someone or something that derived erotic pleasure from your gurgled screams.

As insane as my aquatic-death belief system was, it was my own, and I lived by it for decades. I believed it fervently and planned my swimming – or not-swimming – accordingly. My wife, Leah, however, grew up near plenty of lakes, ponds and rivers, and her mother was her high school’s swim-team coach. She’d swim anywhere, anytime. She even went swimming – prepare yourself – in the winter. I’d heard about people doing this here and there; like maybe going for an instantaneous dip in Norway if you had a sauna inches from your hole in the ice, or for a similarly brief dunk on New Year’s Day in Maine if you had a running car with the heat blasting right at the water’s edge. But deliberate, frequent swimming in a natural body of water, in the winter, without a wetsuit, was not something I realised people did. I’d assumed that being in cold water for more than a few seconds meant that you would contract bronchitis or pneumonia straight away, and you should notify your local hospital to have a bed ready, just in case.

We hadn’t been in London for too long before Leah had assembled a comprehensive list of local swimming areas, which are myriad, and included lidos cold and warm, ponds, reservoirs and even the Thames, if you’re disgusting. I thought, ‘Good for her!’ I wasn’t afraid for her; the bloated postman only wanted me. ’Twas only for me that the slimy vines ran drills, coiling around driftwood and otters, preparing for the day I mustered the courage to enter their murky lair. Others were safe to swim, splash about, ‘tube’, or whatever else they felt they needed to do.

When our son, Henry, was sick and in the hospital, what Leah needed to do was swim, and many a morning she’d find her way to a nearby body of water for a quick dip. She had friends that did it, and she made more friends by doing it, all of whom seemed like lovely people. Insane, but lovely.

Leah knew about my terror of the deep, but for some reason she didn’t think it was worth countenancing in an adult man. So over many, many years she’d invite me to come with her, and I’d conjure a malady whose only remedy was an immediate nap. When Henry was ill, I had far more excuses, but no energy to find the words to use them, so one autumn afternoon, we trundled off to Hampstead Heath, which has a ladies’ and a men’s pond, and brought our dear Henry and his favourite carer, Angela. Angela stayed with Henry while Leah and I sexually segregated ourselves and walked the short distance to our respective ponds. I took off my clothes in the outdoor changing area and put on my bathing suit. It was cool, maybe ten degrees, but that didn’t bother me. I walked purposefully out to the little pier that extended into the pond. It was a beautiful, bucolic scene – to most. But I knew what evil awaited me in the water. I jumped in – and then out, so fast it probably looked like a tape played forward, then instantly backward at the same speed. ‘F**k this,’ I thought, as I towelled off. I joined Henry and Angela, and we all waited on the banks of a different pond while Leah swam leisurely, enjoying herself quite thoroughly. I, on the other hand, had narrowly escaped being eaten, or at least aggressively probed, by the amphibious zombie-priest living in a barrel at the bottom of the men’s pond. Never again, I vowed.

Some months after Henry died, Leah and I took a scuba-diving course to get certified. Leah had always wanted to do it, so I got us the classes as a Christmas present. The first few lessons were in a leisure centre in Soho. Funny that there are so many thousands of things happening mere feet from you in a city as big as London, and one of them is grieving parents learning to scuba-dive in an old pool on the same street as theatres, pubs and Pret-a-Mangers.

When you learn to scuba-dive, you do all the straightforward things you’d imagine, first studying written material and then learning how all the equipment works and how to communicate with your partner. But you also practise situations for when things go wrong, from running out of oxygen to losing visibility if your mask is compromised for some reason. For that particular drill, we would sit at the bottom of the deep end of the pool with no masks on and our eyes closed for a few minutes, then ascend blindly to safety. Before we submerged, the instructor explained that it would be scary, and we might want to freak out or, indeed, might actually freak out. A couple of people in the class were visibly scared. I was not.

I descended the twelve or so feet and sat on the bottom of the pool in darkness and felt lots of things, but none of them were fear. Mainly, I felt strongly that I was in a situation where, if something went wrong, I could very, very quickly be with Henry. And that felt good. Obviously, there were others around me, and I was being observed by more than one instructor, who presumably had incentives not to let their students die, but when we are under water in blackness, we are some type of alone, whether we’re being stared at or not.

I consciously thought, ‘I’m quite a bit closer to death twelve feet underwater and without sight than I was a few minutes ago. My son Henry did death and died not long ago. I won’t take the regulator out of my mouth and inhale a lungful of water on purpose, but if it got knocked out by another failing student and my own fin got caught on a drain, and I panicked and inhaled, and they couldn’t revive me – well, then that would be okay.’ I felt like a lava lamp; the bits of plastic gloop bubbling around in me were actually bits of a dark sort of peace with death, a harmony with the knowledge that my son had died and that my own death would see me walk through a door he had walked through. We would share one more thing together. And that would be f**king great.

When you’re a parent and your child gets hurt or sick, not only do you try to help them get better, but you’re also animated by the general belief that you can help them get better. It might not be the wound-cleaning you personally administer or the medicine you yourself pour into their mouth – you might have to get them to a nurse or a doctor who has the right equipment and skill set – but you believe that it’s you who will get them to the right place, via car or taxi or, God forbid, ambulance, and that, once there, you’ll sit by their side or maybe hold them in your lap and they’ll get what they need. Add a little time to mend, heal, rest, and you’ll soon have an exciting story to tell.

That’s not always the case, though. Sometimes, the nurses and the doctors can’t fix what’s wrong. Sometimes, children die. Whatever’s wrong with your child gets worse and they suffer and then they die. After they die, their body begins to decompose and later it’s zipped into a black bag and taken away by an undertaker in a black van. A few days later, your child is buried in a hole in the ground or cremated in a furnace that incinerates their body into ashes, which you take back to your house and put on a shelf. 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. 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. Maybe one will derail and explode, destroying the station and killing you, and you can go be with your child. Would that be so bad?

Why do I feel compelled to talk about it, to write about it, to disseminate information designed to make people feel something like what I feel? What my wife feels? What my other sons feel? Done properly, it will hurt them. Why do I want to hurt people? (And I do.) Did my son’s death turn me into a monster? That’s certainly possible. It doesn’t sanctify you. Things get broken. Maybe it’s because I write and perform for a living that I can’t help but try to share or communicate the biggest, most seismic event that has happened to me. The truth is, despite the death of my son, I still love people. 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.

Not infrequently, I find myself wanting to ask people I know and like to imagine a specific child of theirs, dead in their arms. If you have more than one child, it’s critical you pick one for this exercise. If you’re reading this, and you have a child, do it now. Imagine them, in your arms. Tubes are coming out of various holes, some of which are natural, some of which were made with a scalpel. There’s mess coming out of some of the tubes. There are smells. The temperature of your child’s body is dropping. No breath, none of the wriggling that seems to be the main activity of kids, no heartbeat. Even just that; imagine searching for your child’s heartbeat and you can’t find one. Their heart will never beat again. It’s not a nightmare you can wake from; defibrillation won’t work. It won’t beat because your child is dead. After a bit, someone will put them in a refrigerated drawer, like you do with celery that turns white and soft when you forget about it. Did you ever make funny horns on their head with shampoo while they were in the bathtub? You will never do that again. Did they ask for help with their shoelaces and their homework? Did you comfort them after a skinned knee? That will never happen again.

It’s unlikely I’ll ever ask anyone to do that face to face. Honestly, the idea makes me laugh. Where would we do it? A kitchen, probably. Do I make them tea first? But the point is that I feel the urge. 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.

I don’t forget. I don’t hanker for much about Victorian times, but the idea of wearing all black following the death of someone you love makes a lot of sense to me. For a while, anyway, I’d have liked you to know, even from across the street or through a telescope, that I am grieving.

Image: Supplied,

A Heart That Works by Rob Delaney is now available. You can purchase it online, here.

Feature Image: Supplied.