Martha Collette Mead, 67, passed away on July 31st in her home in Myrtle Beach, SC, after a fifteen month long battle with brain cancer. She was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, where she met the love of her life, Raymond Mead, at the age of sixteen. Martha was a dance major at Adelphi University, with the ambition and talent to become a professional ballerina until an injury sidelined those dreams. But as with most things in Martha’s life, she didn’t let that stop her from doing what she loved. In 1972 she began teaching dance to children, and in doing so, discovered her profound love and talent for helping other people. If she could teach kids to dance, perhaps she could help other children do even more extraordinary things.

In 1979 she graduated from Downstate Medical Center with a Master’s Degree in Occupational Therapy and began her 36 year long career working with students all over Dutchess and Putnam Counties, helping them to read, write, talk and even walk. She was an underrecognized pioneer in the field of Occupational Therapy and in the development and advancement of Assistive Technologies. If a child needed a tool or a framework or a language to help them grow, she would find it. Or invent one if she had to.

She will never be forgotten.  Her legacy will live on in the lives of every student who sat in her class or stood on her stage. In her husband’s smile as he continues to cherish the house that she made a home.

In the confidence and the courage of her daughter (in-law)...  a woman in whom she recognized her own ambition, relentlessness, and unquietable voice, and with whom she shared mutual  love of the men who were lost without them.

In the inquisitive, relentless mind of her son, in the talent she gifted him, and in his own drive and ambition and inability to settle for anything less than what he knows is good, and right (and the tenacity to reach those standards).

And she will live on in all of the photographs she took, the stories we will tell amongst ourselves, and in the many groups of friends and family left to forge forward, now with a key member missing.

Martha is survived by her best friend and loving husband, Raymond Mead (of Myrtle Beach), her son and daughter-in-law Kevin Mead and Katherine DiSavino Mead (of Los Angeles), her brother, Stephen Dutka (of Poughkeepsie), and more nieces, nephews and grand nieces and grand nephews than it would be possible to count, all of whom she loved with every fibre of her being.

A Funeral Mass will be held 2:00 PM Thursday August 5, 2021 at St. Michael Catholic Church.  The family will receive friends 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM Wednesday August 4, 2021 at Burroughs Funeral Home in Murrells Inlet,

To send an online condolence, please visit https://www.burroughsfh.com/obituary/Martha-Mead

Burroughs Funeral Home & Cremation Services of Murrells Inlet (843.651.1440) is assisting the family.