Martha L. Levine

Martha Lyon Levine died on November 29,2023, peacefully in her sleep after the challenges of many surgeries and dialysis. Her suffering is over. Family and friends surrounded her bedside on her last days at Glendale Memorial ICU.  She was too vibrant and too young to die so soon, age 72, with so much left to give.   Friends remember her as a beautiful woman with a beautiful soul, brilliant and witty but also so warm and welcoming, a great lady who was both strong and delicate. A kind and generous spirit, warm and thoughtful. Her sense of humor was delightful, reminding people of Elaine May. She was a source of wisdom, compassion and confidence for her patients, a revered and trusted guide thorough the chapters of their lives. She devoted herself to helping others, first of all her brilliant son Ben and her husband Marty.   She married Marty September 10, 1978, at the home of the friends who introduced them, on a deck overlooking the Pacific Ocean. (She served M&Ms.) Marty said he knew he wanted to marry her as soon as he saw her on their blind date.   Martha helped everyone, even those she met casually if they sought advice about their kids. And that help was warmly appreciated: colleagues at a school she worked with gave her a little statuette of “St. Martha.” Martha’s Hebrew name was Ahavah, which means Love.   Martha Alyson Lyon was born in Cleveland, August 22, 1951, daughter of Irving Lyon, a successful business executive for the Addressograph-Multigraph company, and Hana (Marver) Lyon, who was a sharp cookie with a sharp tongue. The family moved first to Chicago and then brought up Martha in the hills of the San Fernando Valley.   She liked to remind her USC colleagues that all her degrees were from UCLA.  A brilliant woman, Martha was Phi Beta Kappa, cum laude with departmental honors, and excelled at both her M.A. and her 1979 Ph.D.   A psychoanalyst as well as a psychologist, she was one of the early non-MDs to be trained (she held a Liddle Fund fellowship) at the Los Angles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (now the New Center for Psychoanalysis) and also trained at the Reiss-Davis Child Study Center and, in London, at the Hampstead Child Study Clinic & Course and the Anna Freud Centre.   Martha was an empathic and skilled psychologist, one of the most successful in the city, who benefited many adults, adolescents, and children, especially those with learning disabilities or attention deficits. She was called on to do many psychological and psycho-educational assessments and her reports were models of insight and thoroughness. She was a beloved faculty member of USC’s social work school, devoted to curriculum innovation and mentoring of colleagues, and was awarded the prize as best teacher. Intellectually so alive, she brought new ideas to the training of clinicians, and was a leader in applying contemporary neuroscience research, modern psychodynamic theories, and polyvagal theory.   She also was consultant for the Simms-Mann Institute and Foundation, devoted to helping children aged 0-5. Earlier in her career, as faculty member at USC’s psychiatry department, she directed the NIMH grant to train patient care advocates in mental health and also coordinated continuing education.   Martha was a visiting academic at Oxford’s psychiatry department, and delighted in the full year plus ten summers she and the family spent in Oxfordshire villages, often living in a thatched cottage, where she developed cherished friends. Locals would say the community life would pick up whenever “the Levines are back.” She also lectured at the International Conference on Disability and Development at Peking University and taught social work classes at Beijing Normal University. She enjoyed the Beijing students but not the smog.     Early on she was a faculty member of the Graduate Center for Child Development and Psychotherapy, and at a surprisingly young age was dean of the College of the Center for Early Education. She was a valued literacy, psychological, and curriculum consultant at Willows Community School, Crossroads, the early years of MUSE Elementary School, and LAUSD (numerous children learned to read because of her) and taught teachers, trustees, and doctors at many other independent schools, public schools, and hospitals.   Martha was a community leader. At USC, Martha was regarded as the most creative programming chair the University Club ever had.  She was trustee or director (frequently an officer) of the Center for Early Education, Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities, Clearinghouse for Information on Learning Disabilities, Western Center for the Handicapped, and Center for the Study of Psychological Trauma (where she went to the site of school shootings to help surviving kids.) She was a leader of the Council for the Advancement of Psychoanalytic Education and the LAPSI Clinical Associates Organization and served on the state Department of Education committee on early childhood education.   Her early scholarship was on curriculum development and also on stuttering, and she later published on psychoanalytic education, mental health advocacy, patient rights, ethics of  psychiatrists and of psychologists, the language of psychiatrists, and dementia. She was also a scholar of the sound steps to reading program developed in England.   Martha took joy in the beautiful views from their Los Feliz home, but she also delighted in her overseas travel, many times to England, and also Scotland and Wales, Ireland and Northern Ireland, France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Israel, Mexico, Australia, Korea, China and Japan. She collected crafts and loved to give them as presents to colleagues.   She was a magnificent cook, with a library of over 600 cookbooks, and would ask Marty what country’s cuisine he would like for dinner that night.  She formed friendships with chefs and restauranteurs and could have been a restaurant critic. During the pandemic she researched tasty restaurants to deliver meals (especially sushi and Korean meals) and was expert in finding on the internet food from overseas, gadgets, and other delights.   She took great pleasure in her cats, and her last months were sweetened by a very playful new kitten, Gandalf.   In her last seven (!) years, Martha courageously faced many health challenges and surgeries at Keck Hospital of USC, forming warm friendships with the doctors and staff who cared for her. She was an amazing example of dealing with adversity with strength, grace and incredible resilience.   In addition to Ben and Marty, she is survived by her niece Hilary (Leeron) and their children Lila and Miriam and her niece Lisa (Brian) and their children Elijah, Emma and Chloe.  Her sister Judy (Michale) predeceased her.   Donations in her memory can be made at giveto.usc.edu, then type the word rehabilitation in the search bar, to make a gift to the USC Keck Hospital Acute Rehabilitation Clinic, whose staff were so good to Martha during her multiple lengthy admissions.   Services at Mount Sinai Hollywood Hills, TaNaCH Chapel, 5950 Forest Lawn Drive, at 2:00 on Tuesday, December 5, 2023, followed by a reception.