Sixteen years after the death of his wife, Nancy Dolan, Martin Short is reflecting on her last words — and finding their connection to the couple’s late daughter, Katherine.
“Martin, let me go,” Short, 76, told The New York Times in an interview published on Friday, May 15, recalling to the outlet Dolan’s final message to her husband as paramedics rushed into their bedroom.
Dolan died at age 58 in 2010 following a battle with ovarian cancer. She and Short had been married since 1980.
In his NYT sit-down, Short drew a parallel between Dolan’s death and Katherine, who died by suicide at age 42 in February.
“Katherine was saying: ‘Dad, let me go,’” he continued. “I don’t see any difference between mental illness as a disease and cancer as a disease. In some cases, both are terminal. And in some cases, both are survivable.”
Short added that the loss of his daughter was different than the loss of his wife.
“This is your child,” he said. “I am trying to head toward the light.”
Short and Dolan also shared sons Oliver, 40, and Henry, 36.
The Only Murders in the Building star broke his silence on Katherine’s death in a CBS Sunday Morning interview earlier this week.
“It’s been a nightmare for the family,” he said on Sunday, May 10. “But the understanding [is] that mental health and cancer, like my wife’s, are both diseases, and sometimes with diseases they are terminal. And my daughter fought for a long time with extreme mental health, borderline personality disorder, other things, and did the best she couldn’t until she couldn’t.”
Short also reflected on his multiple family deaths in his new Netflix documentary, Marty, Life Is Short. (In addition to Dolan and Katherine, the actor lost his older brother, David, and both parents, Olive and Charles, in an eight-year span before he turned 21.)
“What it developed in me was this muscle of survival and handling grief, and a perspective on it,” Short told CBS Mornings of navigating those losses. “I think if you’ve gone through that, an audience not liking you is really not that important anymore.”
Though Short’s longtime friend Lawrence Kasdan, who directed the documentary, suggested delaying the project after Katherine’s death, the comedian said he wanted to move forward.
“My instinct was the opposite,” Short explained on Sunday. “Because it’s about love, loss and survival … I think we proceed. We must figure a way to survive through grief without denying it or without in any way undermining its importance.”
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