Before Martin Short ever sat down with CBS to talk about mental illness, his daughter was already doing the work.<\/p>\n
Katherine Short held a master\u2019s in social work from USC after studying psychology and gender studies at NYU. She worked as a licensed clinical social worker<\/a> in Los Angeles, with experience that included Amae Health, UCLA\u2019s Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital, and private practice. She was involved with Bring Change 2 Mind<\/a>, a nonprofit focused on ending the stigma surrounding mental illness. She spent her professional life helping people find language for their struggles and refusing to treat psychological suffering as something to hide.<\/p>\n She died by suicide in February. She was 42, and the family asked for privacy.<\/p>\n On Sunday, her father spoke publicly for the first time about her death in an interview with CBS\u2019s Tracy Smith<\/a>. What he said was not grief performing for cameras. It was the language of someone who had been sitting with this for months, trying to understand it clearly enough to say it out loud.<\/p>\n \u201cMental health and cancer, like my wife\u2019s, are both diseases,\u201d Short told Smith, \u201cand sometimes with diseases they are terminal.\u201d<\/p>\n That sentence was a deliberate reframing of how mental illness gets discussed: not as failure, weakness, or as something that could have been solved if only the right words had arrived in time. \u00a0A disease. Sometimes terminal.<\/p>\n \u201cMy daughter fought for a long time with extreme mental health, borderline personality disorder, other things,\u201d he said, \u201cand did the best she could until she couldn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n That final phrase carries the weight of someone trying to honor both the reality of what happened and the dignity of the person who lived through it. It is also a language Katherine would have understood. She spent her career helping others find exactly that kind of clarity about illness. Her father is now using it to describe hers.<\/p>\n Short also told Smith that Katherine\u2019s death connected in his mind to the final words of his wife, Nancy Dolman, who died of ovarian cancer in 2010. Nancy\u2019s last words were \u201clet me go.\u201d He said he believes Katherine was saying the same thing.<\/p>\n Katherine was not the only person Short lost in early 2026.<\/p>\n Catherine O\u2019Hara<\/a>, Short\u2019s close friend and SCTV co-star, died weeks before Katherine. The Netflix documentary about Short\u2019s life and career, \u201cMarty, Life Is Short<\/a>,\u201d directed by Lawrence Kasdan, is dedicated to both women.<\/p>\n Short told Smith that loss has been a presence throughout his life. By the time he was 20, he had already lost both parents and his older brother David, who died in a car accident. He described what those early losses gave him as \u201ca muscle of survival and handling grief and a perspective on it.\u201d<\/p>\n It is a striking way to describe something that, from the outside, sounds like an unbearable accumulation. He is 76 and has been developing that muscle since he was a teenager. That does not make the losses smaller. It only explains the strange steadiness in the way he talks about them.<\/p>\n![\"988\"](\"https:\/\/wealthofgeeks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Martin-and-Katherine-Short-1024x576.jpg\"\/ "\\"988\\"")
![\"Catherine\"](\"https:\/\/wealthofgeeks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Martin-and-Katherine-Short-1024x576.jpg\" "\\"Catherine\\"")
What He Said, and Why the Framing Matters<\/strong><\/h2>\n
The Losses Stacked up This Year<\/strong><\/h2>\n
![\"David\"](\"https:\/\/wealthofgeeks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Short_OHara-1024x576.jpg\"\/ "\\"David\\"")
![\"Katherine](\"https:\/\/wealthofgeeks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Short_OHara-1024x576.jpg\" "\\"Katherine")