Fly Free, T-Bird! We love you.

David and I just learned that our dear friend, Tim Martin, passed away yesterday. He was and is a beautiful soul and will be deeply missed. I mentioned him after the first of our moves to Kalamazoo: “Thanks again to our superhero friend Tim, aka T-Bird, for all the above and beyond help this weekend.” “Above and beyond” was right.

Tim was not afraid of Death. We spoke of it often, not in a morbid way, but in a natural cycles, Faery Realm, and depth psychology way. On Wednesday he texted me: “Interesting that my first memory is of my brother and I looking for snakes in a brush pile considering how my whole life can be seen as a chthonic journey; realized this this morning on the drive in”

I usually get a heads up when someone close to me is about to pass — sometimes months ahead of time with a 24- to 48-hour window of time when they’ll pass. I’ve had heads up about clients’ relatives I’ve never met, my grandparents’ deaths, my father’s death, death date of a friend’s husband and then sensed her own death. I don’t share this information, because you never truly know, and also I don’t want to give anyone any self-fulfilling prophecies.

But Tim’s passing came as a shock. As his best friends, we are deeply grieving the loss.

We knew he was going through a massive shift, and he sensed it would occur before Winter Solstice. Looking through texts and emails, there were many signs that his liberation might be a bit more dramatic than anyone, including Tim, anticipated.

Tim was a very, very good friend. A huge orb of love in an aching world. He wrote gorgeous poetry and was a voracious reader, always learning, always seeking truth. I used to call him Tim Bombadil after Tolkien’s character, Tom, my favorite from Lord of the Rings. He’s the only Cancer male I’ve ever managed to stay friends with, a 7/7 baby, magical to the core. He loved the Earth as his Mother, made beautiful altars and photographs, offered whiskey to faeries, and his daily communing with Nature surpassed most people’s once-in-a-lifetime peak mystical experience. We texted so often I needed to delete the text streams every six weeks to free up memory on my phone. Now I wish I’d kept them all.

His daughter Eimhear (“ever”) was the light of his life, and we send so much love to her and her family right now.

In a recent text, Tim told me he wanted to be reincarnated as a Nac Mac Feegle. He had nagged me into reading “The Wee Free Men” and then got me hooked on Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching series. In gathering some poems and recent words for his ex-wife and daughter, I felt led to look up this quote about Granny Weatherwax, which, if you knew Tim as we do, you’d find so clearly applies to him, too, in his sacred grove.

And yes, Tim had a truly sacred grove, which we were blessed to enter with him on more than one occasion:

“Tiffany thought of the little spot in the woods where Granny Weatherwax lay. Remembered.

And knew that You had been right. Granny Weatherwax was indeed here. And there. She was, in fact, and always would be, everywhere.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Shepherd’s Crown

As David said in a 3-way text stream with Tim on Friday, “Fly, T-Bird, fly!”

We love you, Tim. Nice to have such a brilliant ally on the Otherside, but we will miss your laugh, your constantly changing ideas, and your bear hugs. We’ll miss your great big heart that overworked itself all these years. Now you can love and be loved with no limitations.

Blessed Be, my friend. You were and are such a blessing in our lives.