Uncle Martin

The Palliative Lens

Andrew Esch MD MBA

3/4/2026

My wife’s uncle Martin is dying.

He is here with us in Tampa, he is enrolled in one of our local hospices. The hospice care itself has been a disaster, and that story may come in another blog. Right now it is simply too sad, too emotional, for me to be articulate about it.

Today I want to celebrate Martin.

Martin is not easy to describe to people who haven’t known him. In many ways, he is an anomaly in today’s world. He is always the smartest person in the room, and often the strangest. He protests and has been arrested for those efforts, but is quick to let you know "arrested yes, but never convicted"

He is liberal, but not comfortably so. He believes deeply in progressive values and yet remains disappointed by both sides of the political aisle. He distrusts slogans, resists tribalism, and has very little patience for performative outrage. He believes in ideas more than parties, and in principles more than movements.

Above all, he is a fierce defender of the First Amendment, not in theory, but in practice.

He was the “75-year-old white man” the police shoved to the ground during the Buffalo protest, an image that briefly ricocheted across the country, stripped of nuance and stripped of the man himself. To some, he became a symbol. To us, he was, and still is, Martin: stubborn, thoughtful, unafraid to stand where he believed he should stand, even when it hurt.

He is also quietly, astonishingly brilliant.

Martin scored a perfect SAT—and then found a mistake. Not a metaphor. An actual error. He noticed it, reported it, and carried that small, almost mischievous fact with him like a badge of honor. It said everything about how his mind worked: precise, restless, unwilling to accept authority simply because it presented itself confidently.

That same mind followed him into illness. When cancer entered his life, Martin learned everything. He knew his disease, his treatments, his labs, often better than the physicians caring for him. Not because they were careless, but because he was relentless. Curious. Exacting. He asked the questions others didn’t even know how to ask.

And yet alongside all of that, his skepticism, his intellect, his political fire, he is deeply religious.

Not loudly. Not performatively. But sincerely. Faith is not a contradiction to his questioning nature; it lives beside it. He holds doubt and belief in the same hands, never insisting that one cancel out the other.

To his nieces, he is a great uncle in the fullest sense, present, interested, engaged.

To his siblings, he was a brother who challenged them, loved them, and never allowed conversations to remain shallow.

To his parents, he was a devoted son, shaped by them and fiercely loyal in return.

And to me?

Marty is someone I assumed would always be here, thinking, questioning, pushing, praying.

I selfishly wish he were still his whole self, not the cachectic shell that can no longer get out of bed and can barely hold a conversation. Conversations with Martin were transformative, and sometimes just really, really weird.

I miss them already.

The world will feel quieter without his particular kind of noise: the thoughtful kind, the principled kind, the kind that refuses to fit neatly into boxes.

Martin Gugino is not easy to summarize. He wouldn’t have wanted to be.

He is contradiction and conviction, intellect and faith, gentleness and steel.

And I am going to miss him so much.