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As you get older, and your memories fade, you realize that you no longer recall the actual memory of what happened as much as the memory of telling the story of what happened. Memories become stories, and stories tend to change. If only I could ask my mother what was real and what wasn’t that night. If only I could ask her if she herself knew. But in her old age her memory has left her, so all I have now is this story, and a pit in my stomach—

I hope to God I never hear that sound again.

Until the age of 10, my mother and I lived in my father’s family home in Upstate New York. I was told that it used to be an old inn along a well-trafficked road around the time of the Revolutionary War, which, in our area, wasn’t unheard of. Whether it was true or not, I honestly don’t know. By the time my father came to live there, you would not know it was ever left in disrepair. By the time my mother won it from him in the divorce, it looked no different than your average home, having been aggressively redecorated and repainted in order to hide the holes he left in some of the walls.

Despite these many modern renovations, it still remained proportionately smaller than most houses, and disproportionately creakier, which as a child would of course cause my imagination to run wild.

With each groan of the floorboards I imagined the blood-soaked ghosts of soldiers, pacing around what was once the parlor, where they may have died writhing in agony, or their pallid widows, rocking back and forth, waiting hopelessly by the frosted windows for their husbands to return from war. My mother’s bedroom was straight down the upstairs hall from mine, and she never hesitated to comfort me and dissuade me of these many nightmares I’d foolishly inflict upon myself.

“It’s just the dark getting settled,” she would tell me. This, my mother had once explained to me, was a phrase she and her brother came up with, back when they were my age (at the time), to give cause for spooky bumps in the night. “It means it’s nothing.”

I was a frightful child (my father saw to that), and yes, my house was always creaking, and creaking, and creaking, but this night— the night that I will now always wonder about, I swear to you that I heard a horrid sound in my home that left no work for my imagination.

The way I remember it, I immediately snuck to my mother’s room and woke her up, though I’m not sure she was actually asleep.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, as she had countless times, and I told her of the sound, beginning with the creaking downstairs. In what means I could articulate at that age, I told her of its deliberateness, and of the intention I heard within it. That horrible sound! I was certain of its maliciousness, because after that initial wooden groan, there was a dreadful quiet, as if to avoid any further noise. The one aspect of that night that remains clear to me to this day— the sound I’ll always be afraid I’ll hear again— was not the creaking downstairs, but the silence that followed it.

Like always, my mother picked me up and set me on her bed beside her, telling me with a smile that everything was alright.

She whispered her usual refrain.

“It’s just the dark getting settled.”

“Why call it that?” I had once asked her. “If it means that it’s nothing, why not just say that it’s nothing?”

“Because,” she had said. “it seems like every time you think it’s nothing, it’s actually something.”

But that night, sitting on her bed, my worries were slow to dissipate. I’m assuming she saw the expression on my face, because I remember her opening the curtains and giving a cursory glance out the window, just to prove that we were okay.

After a moment, she turned back to me.

“We can even lock the bedroom door to be safe,” she said.

“Why?” I wondered. “Is there something wrong?”

Last week I had the unfortunate honor of eulogizing my best friend, Chris Wurzburg. I am posting what I said here for those who were unable to attend the service:

“Chris, what do I do?”

Hi. I’m Kyle. I’m one of Chris’s best friends, of which there are many.

I didn’t sleep last night. At all. I was staring at a blinking cursor on my screen, attempting to put into words the hurricane of thoughts and emotions that has been flooding my brain for the past two weeks. I was thinking, “what could I possibly say that would help anyone in this room right now? What things do I know about Chris, that other people may not but should know, that articulate some of his qualities that some of us were lucky enough to experience?”

As I was sitting there, trying to figure this out, I just couldn’t shake the impulse that I always had when I was dealing with something particularly tough— every fiber of my being wanted to ask “I need your advice. Chris, what do I do?” That’s how it always was.

I'm sure it would come as no surprise to anyone here if I were to say that Chris sometimes liked to break the rules. What if we talked about that? I mean, we could sit here all day regaling each other with tales of Chris being the charming but delinquent goofball that he so loved being. He was one of my oldest friends but somehow I’m still learning new stories about wildly elaborate pranks he pulled and bizarre situations he found himself in.

But as fun as that would be, that didn’t feel like the right road to go down. And also, I don’t want to be the one to try and compete with the excitement with which he would tell those stories.

There were a few things that were immediately apparent about Chris. Things you could see from a mile away. He was talented. He was handsome, he was really, really funny, though he didn’t have to be, because he was so talented and handsome. He was wise, he was loyal, he was sometimes frustratingly stubborn. And Chris was absolutely, maniacally prolific.

This is what would happen when you’d go to Chris’s place, every time. Every single time, as long as I can remember. You’d open the door, and you’d walk in, and you’d be greeted with... the back of Chris’s head, because he’d be sitting at his computer writing music. He’d turn to you and say “hey, check out this new track I’m working on. I want to know what you think.” And he’d reach over to the keyboard, hit the space bar and BOOM. There it was. Some sounds he pulled out of thin air. Some words he bled straight from his heart. That was his music. And it wasn’t just an idea for a chorus, it was like, a complete, fully realized song! Every time it was different, and every time it was the new best thing he ever made.

And the best part was— as you’re listening, you’d look over and he’d be sitting there in his chair, just dancing to his own music. Shamelessly. He was so cool he could do that. Hit play on his own tunes and start grooving out. Chris was the coolest guy.

His music and his singular personality are things we could talk about all day, but again, those are the things you could see from a mile away. There was something else that I feel the need to talk about that I have had the privilege of witnessing over the years.

The moment that Chris left us, there were so many people who, like with the flick of a light switch, immediately felt not only incredibly sad, but scared, and lost. “Well what now?” “Who do I turn to when times get tough?” Just like I was thinking while writing this last night, there are a lot of people that so desperately want to go to Chris right now and ask him that question: Chris, what do I do?

I cannot overstate how grossly influential Chris Wurzburg was on the lives of those he came in contact with. He was the constellation that many of us sailed by, always ahead of us, but always making sure we were right behind him. With him, there was no if; just when. He never tried; he just did. And he allowed you to come along for the ride.

Chris was THE guy to go to for advice. Sometimes he was the angel on one shoulder, and sometimes, he was the devil on the other shoulder. And it was a pleasure learning the “subtleties” of his moral compass. There was one thing for certain though: he cared for those close to him fiercely, and would become whatever friend you needed him to be.

His personality had the gravity of a neutron star, pulling everything in his orbit in the right direction. You would have you, your normal self– and you would have your Chris version of you that would only come out when you were around him. You were probably more artistic, more open minded, more understanding, more accepting. Probably a little cooler.

But the thing that I witnessed happen over and over and over and over again over the years was this— Chris could see through people like an x-ray. He saw things in people that often they didn’t even see in themselves. A talent. A quality. An idea.

If you were lucky enough to have the Chris Wurzburg X-ray turned on you, you were lucky enough to find a door that you didn’t know you could open. There was probably some thing that you were scared to do that Chris would then lovingly pressure you to do. For me, he told me “Kyle, pick up that camera. Learn how to use a computer. Figure out how to make movies.”

Now, that is my career. Chris would find something in everyone around him and the effects of culturing that thing were absolutely transformative.

That’s one of the things that’s so hard about this. A lot of us feel lost at sea without an answer to that question: Chris, what do I do? I’ve been trying to figure out what he’d say about all this. And I can’t. That’s why Chris was Chris. But I can with 100% certainty tell you one thing he would say. One lasting piece of advice. He would tell you to do that thing, whatever that thing he found in you may be. 

Write your song. Paint your masterpiece. Kiss that girl. Make that mistake. Start that new project. Pack up your stuff and move across the country. Have fun. Live your life. Be yourself, as brilliantly and unapologetically as you can. Hug your family. Power through the bad times. Cherish the good times. Tell those that you care about, that you love them. Do the thing.

I love you Chris. We all love you. And when we catch up to you, wherever you are, I can’t wait to hear the new stuff that you’ve been working on.

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