My Lifelong Interest in Suicide: Essay Inspired by Martin Short

Earliest Memories

Though I had no word for it then. I was about four when an awareness of suicide first entered my life. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Irish German Catholic side of my family was always gathering to celebrate something, My cousin Eddie, the son of my father’s sister and one of my favorite people, almost always attended with his friend, John. Eddie’s face, deeply pockmarked, concealed his good looks but not his charm. We loved him. John was the quiet type. His good looks were his calling card; tall with blond hair and blue eyes, the grown-ups dubbed him ‘Tab Hunter’s double.’ He was my first crush.

Eddie and John served as bartenders at these affairs and dance partners to all the women whose husbands couldn’t -or wouldn’t- dance. Eddie would carve out enough space in the basement for dancing once dining was done and enough shots with beer chasers tossed back. They danced with us girls, too. John always danced with me; my feet balanced easily on his shoes as he twirled me around the floor with both of us laughing.

I can still see us. After all these years.

John and Eddie lived together in a basement apartment I only visited once. They were roommates, a description suited to my four-year-old way of thinking and much too young to understand the power of hate. When I did visit their apartment, John was not there. My cousin Eddie looked awful. I remember his puffy face. Years later, I was told the truth, John hung himself in their closet. Eddie found him. I don’t recall ever finding out why he took his own life though once I did understand the power of hate, I didn’t wonder anymore.

Professional Experiences with Suicide

In college, I earned a BSN in nursing and decided to make psychiatric nursing my specialty. I took a job at the University of Chicago research unit where I trained and learned a great deal during my years there. When we lost a patient to suicide, an elderly MD/PhD and professor at the medical school conducted a workshop for staff called ‘The Psychological Autopsy.’ Its purpose, to help us understand what we had missed, if that was the conclusion drawn by the end of the workshop. Eventually, I left the unit to earn my master’s in psychiatric nursing. My thesis centered on suicide and the stigma glued to it, even within some mental health centers.

I moved across the country and took a job as head nurse of a small psychiatric hospital in South Orange County, California. One of our patients, a middle-aged mother of four, was someone I came to know quite well during her many months at the facility. Back then, I usually fastened my long hair back with clips, always in different colors and designs, which she always noticed. When staff hosted a baby shower for me during my pregnancy, she gave me these clips as a gift. I still keep them in my jewelry box. Soon after my baby shower, she went home for a weekend visit and did not return. The police found her body in her van at the beach.

What I Understand Now

What began for me as an unnamed childhood awareness of suicide later became a professional focus, and now, in this stage of my life, a deeper understanding still. Recent reflections from Martin Short helped me see that even a lifetime of experience does not end the learning. In interviews surrounding his Netflix documentary Marty: Life Is Short, Martin Short speaks about his wife Nancy and their daughter Katherine, now both gone. Nancy died of cancer in 2010, and Katherine died by suicide in 2026.

His understanding of their lives and his losses will remain with me. Martin Short said that his wife and daughter “stayed as long as they could.” I also recall reading in his memoir, I Must Say, published four years after Nancy’s death, the devastation he felt when she entered hospice at home and initially, he could not honor her wish to die there. At one point near the end when her breathing became significantly labored, he panicked and called the fire department. After they left, she asked him to please let her go. When the time did come, he was able to honor her wish.

Martin Short’s understanding of the illnesses that led to the deaths of both his wife and daughter echo the words of a client whose memoir I have been helping prepare for publication. Her son lived with mental illness, tormented at times, that began in his college years. He attempted suicide several times before he succeeded. He was a creative, sensitive man who stayed thirty-seven years. In the last chapter of her memoir, his mother writes, “If he could have stayed longer, I believe he would have…”

Given my training, for years I assumed I knew more than most about suicide. Now I understand that I knew only as much as I could. Martin Short’s words, and my client’s memoir, have become new teachers for me. The understanding some parents reach—that their children stayed as long as they could—offers me a measure of comfort and has enriched my understanding of grief.