See Another Sunset
Ask the hard thing. Say the true thing. And then go watch a sunset with someone you love, while you still can.
Buy the book on Amazon
Ask the hard thing. Say the true thing. And then go watch a sunset with someone you love, while you still can.
Buy the book on Amazon
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 wrote in the twenty-one months that followed. It is 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 reports and 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.
Made for a parent and their teenager to read together, chapter by chapter. Each chapter opens with a question instead of a summary, 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.
An appendix gathers every question from every chapter into a single resource, alongside the plain-language warning signs of depression, followed by Kent’s quiet admission that almost none of them were visible in his son.
Chapters 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. Others step back to ask harder questions about an entire generation.
If you knew you only had one more sunset to watch, who would you want to watch it with?
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 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, with a son, a daughter, a friend, a parent.
Every year since we lost Max, our team walks in the AFSP Out of the Darkness walk in Springfield, Illinois, with new team shirts each year. If Max’s story means something to you, come walk with us.
I’m glad to visit book clubs, grief groups, schools, and community events to talk about Max and the book.
seeanothersunset@gmail.com