By design, it wasn’t entirely a happy homecoming for comedian and actor Rob Delaney Saturday night at the Performing Arts Center at the Veterans Middle School.
“I hear sniffling out here … good!” Delaney said, using his trademark humor to break the tension.
The story about the final days of he and his wife Leah’s third child, Henry, was supposed to be sad, he explained. Henry was diagnosed with a brain tumor around his first birthday and died before turning 3. In unsparing detail, Delaney wrote about his family’s heartbreaking experience in the memoir, “A Heart That Works.”
To be sure, there were plenty of laughs during the “Hearts & Humor” benefit for the Marblehead Counseling Center, which featured an hour-long conversation between Delaney and WBZ-TV news anchor Lisa Hughes. Both Delaney and Hughes donated their time so that 100% of the proceeds could support the Counseling Center’s work.
Those laughs started early, as Delaney bemoaned his decision not to do a soundcheck before the doors opened and thus got his first look in a long time from a stage on which he once performed as a Marblehead High School thespian.
He was taken aback by the murals at the back of the auditorium, new since his last visit. The seats — and the smells while waiting in the wings just off stage — were far more familiar, Delaney quipped.
Delaney has gone on to appear on the big screen in a number of major feature films, including “Deadpool 2” and its recently released sequel, “Deadpool & Wolverine.”
When Hughes explained that their discussion would recount Delaney’s mental health journey, Delaney was quick to offer a disclaimer.
“I don’t know anything about mental health,” he said, adding, “I have it. I use it.”
But he was no expert, Delaney insisted.
Hughes first delved into Delaney’s battle with alcoholism, which he described as “pretty garden variety.” “Which is to say, when I drank it, I was like, ‘Oh, this feels much better than when I’m not drinking alcohol.'”
Delaney had his first drink at age 12. By age 25, he had crashed his car into a building in Los Angeles.
When a police officer showed up at his bedside at the hospital, the first question he asked was whether anyone else had been hurt in the accident. When he was told “no,” Delaney said he let out a big sigh.
“I was like, ‘Alright, I can work with that,'” Delaney said. “And [the police] were like, ‘Alright, let’s go to jail.'”
Delaney has been sober for 22 years, and he again characterized his journey to sobriety as unremarkable, involving a standard 12-step program and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
Delaney healed from the injuries he had suffered and sufficiently repaired his life to once again be employable. But he soon found himself dealing with depression, which is not uncommon among people in recovery, he would learn.
There were “real physical components” to his depression, Delaney explained. There were waves of pain.
“I’d wake up and go brush my teeth, and as soon as the toothbrush touched my tongue, I would puke,” he said.
At first, Delaney said he resisted medication because he felt like he was doing the “right stuff”: abstaining from drinking, exercising, working and volunteering in the community.
But he eventually relented and is glad he did.
“It wasn’t magic, but gradually I began to feel better, and I began to feel the emotions rather than just the throbbing pain and depression,” he said.
Delaney recounted how he and his family came to settle in London, thanks initially to his manager, who was the head of the tiny American satellite office of a large British talent agency.
After performing stand-up comedy for a while, Delaney was asked to write a pilot episode of the TV show that became the critically acclaimed “Catastrophe,” which Delaney co-created with co-star Sharon Horgan.
At the time, Delaney’s wife was teaching middle school English at Culver City Middle School in Los Angeles and took a leave of absence.
Delaney said he told Leah, “We’ll go there for six months, they will immediately cancel the show, and then we’ll come back.”
That was 10 years ago.
But Delaney laughs that many assume that the family “fell in love” with London and could not bring themselves to return to the United States. As he made clear, Delaney does not think much of what passes for “nature” in London, including a lack of animals that can kill you.
“You should be afraid of nature when you walk out of your house,” he joked.
He and his family would much rather be frolicking in the waves of Devereux or one of the North Shore’s other beaches, he explained.
The packed auditorium fell silent as Delaney recounted his son Henry’s diagnosis at the age of 1, which resulted from a wise older doctor realizing that Henry’s effortless vomiting could be the result of pressure from a brain tumor.
Surgery left Henry unable to speak, but he was a quick study with sign language, so quick that the rest of the family struggled to keep pace.
Henry would spend 14 months in the hospital, but his brothers were never far.
“One thing that we did do well was we really kept the family together,” Delaney said.
There are hundreds of photos of all three boys in the hospital learning sign language on the television or playing.
Henry had to be fed through a tube, and even his younger brother learned how to administer a feeding — with supervision, Delaney assured.
Delaney described “A Heart That Works” as “merely an addition to the canon” of people writing about people that they love and had lost.
“I’m not the first person to write a book about a child that died, but it’s one little tile in the mosaic,” he said.
One of the best parts of writing the book is that he was creating a testament that he will be able to point to when Henry’s brothers are old enough to appreciate it and say, “Look what you did.”
Henry died on his father’s birthday, which Delaney explained was actually something of a blessing. A few days later, and it would have been his older brother’s birthday instead.
Delaney shared a bit about the poignant ritual the family uses to mark the anniversary of Henry’s death and also described the invaluable support he has gotten from a weekly swimming group with mothers who had also lost children.
He also said he gained a newfound appreciation for his own work.
“I used to think what I do for a living is kind of embarrassing, and now I’m like, no, it’s actually really important, or rather, it’s not any less important,” Delaney said.
Just as he might need the bus driver to get around the city, that bus driver also needs a silly show to unwind once he gets home.
“The bus driver and the clown are friends,” he said.
To the extent that Delaney felt comfortable with offering words of advice for dealing with tragedy and sadness, he said, “You don’t want to do this alone.”
Delaney said he has found that talking to other people “can be quite magical.”
“People are generally good, and they want to help,” he said.
