Martin Short, the Canadian-born comic and star of Only Murders in the Building, speaks openly about his daughter Katherine Short’s death, his history with grief and his new Netflix documentary “Marty, Life is Short.” In a recent CBS interview with Tracy Smith he described the loss as “a nightmare” and explained how it pushed him toward advocacy with the Bring Change to Mind nonprofit. The film, directed by Lawrence Kasdan, is dedicated to Katherine and to Catherine O’Hara, and it arrives on Netflix on Tuesday, May 12.
Short says losing Katherine in February was devastating and that the family is still reeling. “it’s been a nightmare for the family,” he told the interviewer, a line that cuts straight to the heart of what grief can do to a household. Katherine was 42 when she died; she was one of three children Short adopted with his late wife, Nancy Dolman, who passed away in 2010 from ovarian cancer.
In the CBS sit-down Short opened up about his daughter’s long-running struggles with mental illness and the complexity of coping with both mental health and terminal disease. He reflected that “mental health and cancer (like my wife) are both diseases, and sometimes with diseases they are terminal,” phrasing that links his private losses across decades. That perspective informs his new public work and his decision to work with others trying to destigmatize mental illness.
Short did not shy away from naming the specific challenges Katherine faced. “My daughter fought for a long time with extreme mental health, borderline personality disorder, other things, and did the best she could until she couldn’t. So Nan’s (Nancy’s) last words to me were ‘Mart, let me go’ and she was just saying ‘Dad, let me go,’” he said, preserving the haunting echo between two very different family tragedies. He has turned that pain into a reason to speak up and to push conversations about suicide and illness into the open.
That push is what led him to Bring Change to Mind, the mental-health nonprofit founded by Glenn Close, which aims to remove shame from mental illness and suicide. Short described a “deep desire” to be involved and stressed the need to stop hiding words like suicide and to accept the reality that some illnesses end lives. The charity work is now part of how he processes grief and tries to create meaning from loss.
The documentary “Marty, Life is Short” looks back over Short’s career with archive footage and candid interviews, and it carries dedications to both Katherine and Catherine O’Hara, who died just weeks before Katherine. Directed by Lawrence Kasdan, the film lets viewers see how the comic’s public persona and private sorrows coexist. It traces a long career in comedy while also documenting the human cost of fame and loss.
Grief is a familiar subject for Short beyond recent years: by age 20 he had already lost both parents and his older brother David in a car crash, experiences that shaped him early. “What it developed in me is this muscle of survival and handling grief and a perspective on it and it stayed with me,” he told Tracy Smith, describing how repeated bereavement became a kind of endurance training. That hardened resilience now sits beside fresh wounds that have reopened old places inside him.
Short also spoke about how he copes in day-to-day life, admitting he has never been in therapy and relying instead on personal routines. “You just have to breathe in, breathe out,” he said, adding that he dictates thoughts into his phone, transcribes and rewrites them before putting them away. He believes confronting mortality helps: “I think we are all in denial about our limited time on this Earth. It’s very difficult to accept it.”
His takeaway is not tidy consolation but a realistic, slightly rueful acceptance that life is complicated and that wisdom eases the journey. “The more you accept it, I think, it does lift you and make you feel that this is a complicated little journey, life. And the more we approach it with wisdom, probably the happier we’ll be,” he said, offering a frank, human response rather than platitudes. The documentary arrives on Netflix on Tuesday, May 12, giving a wider audience a chance to see that tension between laughter and sorrow up close.
