It's the end of Rob Delaney's final day of press for Catastrophe, and he's extremely tired. He moves softly through the GQ photo studio where I meet him, like a man conserving his final dregs of energy before he can finally sleep, perhaps for a full year.

Over the last year or so, Rob Delaney has finished the final season of Catastrophe, the critically acclaimed sitcom about a middle-aged hookup that gets out of hand and becomes a family, a show he co-created with Irish comedian Sharon Horgan. (And the reason he moved his family to London.) He showed up for a brief, very funny cameo in Deadpool 2. And Delaney has publicly, painfully mourned the loss of his two-year-old son Henry, who died after a year-long struggle with brain cancer.

He is vulnerable, but not only. He is, as he will tell you, still mourning, and will, as far as he can tell, always be. He's also built like a bear: very tall, with extremities best described as "square." He's got a face that looks made for scowling, and hands built for brawling. (He's also from Massachusetts, which seems to fit.) The punchline comes when you sit across from him: the classically handsome ad-man smile he deploys after joking about bodily functions, or the openness with which he talks about tremendous personal tragedy, and his commitment to speaking about it publicly. Rob Delaney talks, and he does it with a level of comfort that's, at times, impossible to believe. When he does, it's like an early-1900s medical lecture where a doctor performs surgery with his bare hands in front of a live audience. Except Delaney performs the surgery on himself. Sometimes with jokes, sometimes without. And still, seated on a couch beside me—one of the last people he has to talk to before he can finally go back to London and rest—he's remarkably giving.

"We all have our life things that make us up and the ingredients of my life lately—yeah, a lot of grief for my son. It would be insane of me to try to tamp that down," Delaney tells me. "I don't predict the future, but there's the possibility that years down the road, the grief over Henry might be a smaller piece of the pie. I talk to other bereaved parents who, when they think about their child who's died, the first thing they do is smile and have fun memories—and then sadness, of course. That sounds healthy to me. Certainly, I smile when I think about Henry, but of course I also cry. But that's what you're supposed to do—you're supposed to be in incredible pain when your child dies. So I am, and will be until something else happens."

A lot of the touch points in Delaney's life involve trauma, and they're things he's talked about extensively in interviews and Vice columns and his 2013 book— Rob Delaney: Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage. He's told the world about his struggle with alcoholism and his seventeen years of sobriety, years he frequently came close to losing entirely—at 25 years old he drunkenly drove a car into the wall of a Los Angeles Department of Water and Power office in 2002, broke both of his arms and split his knees open. It was only then that he started living a sober life.