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Louise Thomas
Editor
Rob Delaney has said he wants to buy the house his son died in so he can pass away there too.
The actor and his wife Leah’s two year old son Henry passed away in January 2018 at the age of two, following two years of treatment for a brain tumour.
Delaney asked the landlord of the property to let him know if he was ever selling the house so he could buy it from him.
Speaking on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs programme, the US comedian said he wanted to buy the home “so when I’m 81 I can crawl in here and die. In the same room that my son died in, that my other son was born in.”
Delaney said that he and Leah told their son they were expecting another child before he passed away.
“He had to know that his family that loved him was alive and was growing and that there was somebody that we were going to tell about him,” the Catastrophe star said.
We knew that they would not overlap corporally on this Earth, even though Henry’s younger brother was born in the same room that Henry died in, our living room.”
Delaney has previously opened up about Henry’s diagnosis, time in hospital and death in his book, A Heart That Works.
Henry first showed symptoms of a brain tumour at 11 months old, when he began repeatedly vomiting.
Delaney said doctors told him they suspected a tumour on 27 April, 2016 – the day after he won a Bafta Award for Catastrophe with co-writer with Sharon Horgan.
Describing the day he and Leah received the results from the MRI scan, Delaney said it was “the heaviest pain in the world”.
“Grief drove a bus through the part of my brain where memories are stored,” Delaney said.
“After the MRI, Dr Anson confirmed that Henry had a large tumour in the back of his head, near his brain stem. He delivered the news calmly, and ended by saying a paediatric brain surgeon would come to see us within a few hours.
“We sank inside ourselves. The heaviest pain in the world. I felt like I had suddenly quadrupled in weight, and an oily, black whirlpool began to swirl where my heart had been.”
Henry underwent an operation to remove the tumour, and was able to move back home in June 2017. However, a follow-up scan in September found that the cancer had returned.
Recalling the family’s final few days with Henry, Delaney said: “I lay with him, and Leah held him and danced with him. His brothers read to him and played with him.”
The toddler passed away peacefully at home in January 2018.
“It was just the five of us in the house. Five people who loved each other and needed each other. Henry opened his eyes and looked into Leah’s eyes around five the next morning. Then he died,” Delaney writes.
“I am so happy Henry died at home. I am so happy that he did so in the arms of his beautiful mother, who loved him desperately.
“I am so happy that he lay between us afterward and we could kiss and hold him and stroke his beautiful, long, sandy-blond hair.”
