Martin Short is sharing the painful reality of navigating life after the loss of a child.
On Wednesday, Oct. 14, the 76-year-old actor attended the fourth annual Rare Impact Fund Benefit in Los Angeles. During the charity event, his Only Murders in the Building co-star Selena Gomez took the stage to debut a new award dedicated to Short’s daughter, Katherine, who died by suicide at age 42 in February.
“It has been a very difficult year for me, needless to say,” Short told the crowd. “It has been the heartbreak of our family, as you can imagine.”
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Katherine Short and Martin Short attend Vanity Fair’s 17th annual Oscars party at the Sunset Tower Hotel in 2011.
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Honoring a Life of Service
Gomez created “The Katherine Short Legacy Award” to recognize individuals making a tangible impact in their communities.
“Marty has been my friend for many years, and I know how deeply he loves his family,” Gomez said before inviting him up to present the inaugural honor. “I’m very grateful that he’s here tonight to help us present it for the first time.”
When Short joined her at the microphone, he praised her as “one of the most brilliant women in the world” before turning his focus to Katherine’s memory. He told the audience that his daughter worked as a clinical social worker and spent her career advocating for open, compassionate conversations around mental health.
Reframing Mental Illness as a Disease
Short also spoke about how society views psychological struggles. He compared his daughter’s experience to the ovarian cancer battle that claimed the life of his late wife, Nancy Dolman, in 2010.
“Katherine fought for so long with extreme mental health issues, borderline personality [disorder], other things — and she did the best she could until she couldn’t,” Short shared. “Mental health and cancer, which took my wife, for example, are both diseases. They are diseases, and sometimes diseases are terminal.”
He emphasized that psychological conditions are “simply an illness” that should never be hidden in the shadows or treated as a source of family embarrassment.
While Short acknowledged that the grief will never fully go away, he found comfort in a quote from Dolly Parton.
“The great Dolly Parton once said, ‘Grief is love with no place to go,’” he told the crowd. “My pain about losing my daughter will always be present in my heart, and I think that’s simply because what we deeply love we can never lose, for all that we love deeply becomes part of us.”
