On December 9, 2024, Kent Mayes lost his son.
Ten days earlier, Max-21 years old, a junior in the theatre department at TCU, funny, social, close with his sister, thriving by every visible measure-had flown home wearing a new jacket, a note and a hundred-dollar bill folded in the pocket by an aunt who loved him. He wore it the whole flight, coat and all. Nothing about that week looked like goodbye.
See Another Sunset is the book Kent Mayes wrote in the twenty-one months that followed-not a chronicle of grief to be read alone in the dark, but a father's attempt to hand other families something he didn't have: a way to have the conversation before it's too late to have it.
This is not a book that will tell you there were signs you could have caught. Often, there weren't. Kent filed FOIA requests. He interviewed every responding officer himself. He read the autopsy report, the toxicology results, the letters his son left behind. He knew his son as well as any father could. And still, he didn't see it coming-because Max, like so many young people, had become extraordinarily good at appearing fine.
Written to be read aloud, chapter by chapter, by a parent and their teenager, See Another Sunset opens each chapter with a question instead of a summary-Has something ever felt so heavy you didn't know how to say it out loud, even to someone who loves you? If you knew you only had one more sunset to watch, who would you want to watch it with?-and leaves room to actually answer it, out loud, together. A front-matter guide tells parents exactly which chapters carry harder material before they arrive, so no family is caught off guard. A back-matter appendix gathers every question from every chapter into a single resource, alongside the plain-language warning signs of depression-followed by Kent's own quiet, devastating admission that almost none of them were visible in his son.
The book moves between the intimate and the wide-angle: chapters that tell Max's story in fragments-his childhood, his stage roles, the friends who carried a secret, the sister who absorbed the news completely alone-alongside chapters that step back to ask harder questions about an entire generation. What did parents raising kids in the eighties and nineties have that their own children may never get? Why does a generation raised with real, unsupervised, undocumented time seem to be weathering adulthood differently than one raised with a screen in reach before it could walk? And what does it mean that depression, at its core, may simply be the inability to construct a future-at a moment when so many young people, regardless of what's underneath it, are struggling to picture one at all?
See Another Sunset does not offer easy comfort, and it does not pretend that asking the right question would have saved everyone. What it offers instead is permission-to ask the hard thing anyway, to say the true thing out loud, and to stop waiting for the perfect moment to have the conversation that might matter most. It is a book about loss, and about the fear that keeps so many of us from saying what needs to be said while there's still time to say it-to a son, a daughter, a friend, a parent.
Ask the hard thing. Say the true thing. And then go watch a sunset with someone you love, while you still can.
