My older brother, Martin Delray, loved music. 

Had he not been so sick, he probably would have persued a career in music.  He loved to sing and play the guitar.  He was very good at it, too.

Then he got AIDS from a tainted transfusion, and less than six months later, he was diagnosed with HIV.  He did okay for a while, but then the HIV turned into AIDS, and less than two years later, he was gone.  It hit him that fast.

I hated seeing Martin (we called him Marty) suffer so needlessly; I really didn't understand what his illness was all about, and I hated people saying things that were not true .  They said that Marty was gay when he was not.  He was as straight as an arrow; he had a girlfriend who doted on him, and he only got AIDS because of some bad blood.  (He had had leukemia and got a transfusion; this transfusion, in kind, was tainted, and it caused Marty to get sicker than he already was.)

I hated to see people staring at him or seeing Marty have to go in and out of the hospital for one thing or another.  If it wasn't his leukemia, it was something else related to his AIDS, and I began to hate AIDS more and more.

Marty eventually got worse and he ended up dying from AIDS.  He was only 43 years old when he died.  He left behind his girlfriend as well as her child, my cousin, Logan Padriac, who was then 13 months old (he's now a little over two and a half years of age).  He also left behind a trail of broken hearts, especially from us, his closest family members.

I was very close to Marty.  He came over to our house when he wasn't in the hospital; he would always play us his latest compositions.  I enjoyed listening to him sing and pick the guitar.  He wanted to be another songwriter in the style of Jim Croce or Bob Dylan; he loved their music.  He also loved country music; George Strait was his choice.  He wanted to be famous and travel the world, play stages like Carnegie Hall or the Grand Ole Opry; but he never made it because his leukemia (and then HIV and later on, AIDS) took their toll on his body and he wasn't physically able to travel.  It truly broke his (and our) hearts.

When Marty died, it was the worst thing that could have happened to us.  His death hit us like a ton of bricks; now nearly two years later, we still find it hard to believe that he is gone and is never coming back.  We have his guitar and tapes of his music; we may end up doing a song for him, as a way of keeping Marty's spirit alive.  He truly impacted our lives and we want other people to see just how much he meant to us.

~To be continued!~