The comedian navigated the worst grief imaginable, while writing the end ofCatastrophe.
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His face was on billboards and subway ads.
His wife gave birth to their third child, a beautiful baby boy named Henry.
He had surgery to remove it and spent over a year in the hospital recovering.
Then the tumor returned.
Delaneys fourth son was born a few months later.
And through it all, he was still writing and starring in that hit comedy show.
When the Tate Modern appears on our right, it earns his solemn, if slightly overzealous, admiration.
I get intoxicated with the Brutalist architecture of London, he says.
Its indefensibly ugly stuff.
I just want to caress it and live in it.
Delaney is frequently a big idiot onCatastrophe.
His face is a circus of emotion.
When she gets pregnant, they decide to get married and make a go of it.
Delaney started writingCatastrophes final season just weeks after Henry died.
Delaney found himself terrified that he would be too scared to bond with his newborn this time around.
I knew that I would love him, he says.
How do you go to your own childs funeral when youre pregnant?
(Tweets like this arent therapeutic to me, nor are they updates.
I just want other bereaved parents & siblings to feel seen/heard/respected/loved, he explained in one.)
In doing so, the comedian has become an envoy of sorts for the bereaved.
Grieving people arent lepers.
They dont need to be handled with kid gloves.
They know what happened.
Just acknowledge it, you know?
When he talks about Henry, Delaney picks at his fingernails and speaks gently and deliberately.
Hes absolutely still my son, and he commands a big percentage of my attention each day.
I loved him when he was alive.
I still love him and talk to him and think about him every day.
Six months after he moved to L.A. to pursue a comedy career, it finally caught up with him.
He was thrown in jail, then did a stint in rehab and a halfway house.
Last month, he celebrated 17 years of sobriety.
It burned away a lot of stuff that I dont really care about, he says.
Im not going to talk about stuff that doesnt genuinely inspire me or anger me or make me afraid.
One big thing is that I still enjoy writing.
I still enjoy being funny.
And he is still deliriously funny.
Another story is about the familys pet lizard, Jackie, escaping for a month.
Yeah, its fuckin dead, he says.
Its dead, you killed it, and its dead and its in hell.
Delaneys Twitter presence, once a flood of dirty jokes, is now merely a trickle of dirty jokes.
They are vastly out-numbered by the political posts he shares constantly with his 1.5 million followers.
After his car accident, he became an almost single-issue voter on health care.
I was so excited when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez surpassed me in followers, he admits.
If anything, Delaney says his rising star has made him even more committed to his ideals.
It happened so quickly for us as to be silly.
Now I know its just a joke and a game.
This prompts three preteen boys to pause their gleeful chant of Fuck Theresa May!
which was objectively adorable to witness and whisper among themselves, wondering who the celebrity is in their midst.
Excuse me, one finally musters the courage to ask.
Are you Lemony Snicket?
Delaney erupts into laughter before regretfully informing them that he is not the wildly popular childrens-book author.
He has said all he wants to say about the early years of a marriage and parenthood.
What he wants now is some time to sit and think about what to say next.
He is also more aware of his mortality than ever before, and hes embracing it.
Even the people I love most are gonna die, and they could die before me.
Which is just bullshit, he says.
For the immediate future, he has other plans.
Delaney just finished a training program, so I ask if the couple has any upcoming trips.
Were going to a fucking pond near Heathrow.
Talk about the bleakest surrounding, he says with a touch of grim amusement.
Honestly, Im excited because when would you ever do that?
Anybody can scuba dive in the Bahamas.
It takes a special kind of person to kit up and hop in a pond by the airport.
*This article has been corrected to show that Delaney said bronze, not brown.
