Recently, I picked up a snowflake pendant that Martin gave me when he went skiing in Stowe, Vermont.  We stayed in touch after he went to work at Westinghouse in Pittsburgh.  I had heard he moved to California a few years ago. Just yesterday, I decided to look up his name again, and I saw this tribute to him. 

We both lived on Eddy Street in Ithaca in 1966. He became a close friend to me. I was such a shy person at that time. We spent a day traveling to Elmira and back.  I remember that he had a myna bird as a pet. We made jokes about Howard Johnson's - a restaurant that many Cornell students would go to at that time. We corresponded for a few years. He always listened and gave good advice. I still have his letters and a telegram he sent me. I reread them from time to time. Memories do fade but not the warmth we had for each other.

I was glad to read that he had a happy life and continued to give much to others and the community. 

My name is Sandhya and I knew Marty for about 15 years through devotional singing and Sufi dancing circles in the North San Diego area. At First Sunday Chant, Marty and I shared responsibility for the event setup and facility concerns. I thought of Marty as a "force of nature" who had an incredible amount of energy for helping others and supporting the spiritual community. Also, he was the only friend I had who actually liked to correspond by e-mail!

I very much admired the work Marty did for so many years with ACA and Seaside Community Church. Even though I knew that Marty has risen to a leadership position within the venerable ACA organization, I didn't realize the extent of his other involvement with the church until after he was gone. I also wasn't clearly aware of the depth of the connection that Marty and I had developed over the years. For the first few weeks after he left his body, I kept wanting to call him to say that it wasn't okay for him to have left us so suddenly and we needed to have a good talk about that. The only other departed person with whom I had this experience was my best friend, Victoria, whom I had known since high school.

Initially, I felt very sad about Marty's sudden passing, alone in his car in the hospital parking lot. Then our friend, Wendy Wilde, said it was probably for the best, as Marty wasn't the kind of guy who would have liked having his many friends hover around his sickbed for days or weeks on end. I realized then that Wendy was right: God had provided the perfect way for Marty to make his transition to the next step on his journey toward the Light. May we always remember Marty as a person who truly loved other human beings and never gave up on anyone, no matter what challenges came up along the way.