David A. Windham thumbnail

Kristopher Roland Windham

It is with a very heavy heart that I begin to write this… the last of this year has been tough for me because my brother is dying.  I spent the last week with him and he died yesterday, Sunday December 12th, 2021.  

I’ve been telling him for quite some years that we’re all in the process of dying. We all start the process at a certain age, it’s just that his is a little more accelerated than most due to the fact that he has had medical issues since he was young. I started writing this about a month ago after some frank conversations with him. I’ve still got his relics spread all about my office and our email and text threads which go back ten years. I hate to think of his obituary being the entry point for little trail of breadcrumbs that many folks leave online, so I figured I’d write and publish this in his honor alongside of a directory of some memories he left. I’m writing this not as he might like it to be written, but how I want to write it which he would understand. We discussed publishing it and having fun with his own obituary before he died because that’s the type of humor we reveled in. I’ve always tried to have a relatively sunny outlook on death because it’s just part of life.

What is evident amongst the relics I’ve been going through is that Kris was exceptionally unique. I’m not just saying that in hindsight, just ask anyone who ever knew him. He taught me a lot about life that I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to gain otherwise because he had a tendency to live everyday in the moment… like it might be his last. Because of it, he’s managed to live a life long beyond his years. Even though he was several years younger, I likely learned more from him than the other way around. My father repeated that to me during a recent phone conversation saying “Kris told me that he’s done more than most people will ever do in their lives”. It took me a very long time to truly understand and appreciate that outlook on life.

Kris and I were born about two years apart in Columbia South Carolina in the 70s. My parents gave him his first name after Kristopher Kristofferson1. There are certainly similarities. When I look back at the old photos of when we were really young I can see my parents’ hope.  I think the whole Nixon and Vietnam affairs had really turned my parents’ lives inward. Mom was making macramé crafts and dad had started playing country music. I’ve since done my due diligence, and I can only sympathize with their fondness. Not unlike Kristofferson landing a helicopter on Johnny Cash’s lawn, I found several photos of the back of Cash’s house in my old family slides. The album Jesus Was a Capricorn and the movie Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore were released just months before Kris was born.  Kristofferson songs will always remind me of my brother.  Roland is an old family name on my father’s side. I was always envious of his name. Kristopher Roland was a very appropriate name.

Because Kris and I were relatively close in age, I think we were more than just siblings but also companions and friends. He shaped a lot of my personality and I possibly his. Almost all of my early memories are accompanied by his presence. His friends were mostly my friends and vice versa.  I vividly remember some of our earliest years learning to swim, play ball, and ride bicycles.  We shared most of our childhood together and we learned a lot from one another.  Growing up, our parents were a nice blend of mom reading her fair share of contemporary books on child raising and my father’s conservative personality having grown up in a large family with a retired WWII veteran father. Kris, being the younger could always find a sympathy from mom and I tended to trend after my father. We were encouraged to be well mannered, expressive, intelligent, and creative. We spent a lot of time around adults as children so I think we were particularly mature while still being able to escape into our own playful imaginary worlds.  We loved cartoons, comics, music, and games. We developed our own code languages and games. We would lay out large scale board games in the dining room table that would take months to complete. Some of of my earliest memories are he and I spending months trying to solve The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy2 computer game, and getting deeply involved in Middle-earth Role Playing3. Our taste and interest really never split too far apart over the years. 

Very early on, my family always poked fun at how picky an eater Kris was, but the reality was that it was an early sign of Crohn’s disease4. He would only eat very few foods and was very particular about eating.  Kris had his first surgery for Crohn’s while he was still in elementary school. By the time he was into his teens his belly had been cut up like Frankenstein.  He also had various medications to deal with the disease. He’d bulk up on the steroids and then lose a lot of weight.  I still have the scars of trying to fight him while he was on steroids. His sleep patterns were also always off too. In retrospect, I think he was consistently in a bit of pain and he really did his best to hide it from everyone. Because of it, I’m very sympathetic to those with disability and disease. Kris’ personality was forever shaped by it and I think by his early teens he had given up on the illusion of trying to be ‘normal’. He has a pretty funny grin in about every family photo taken and I really appreciate that now. 

Normal was not in Kris’ vocabulary and I could tell that he always had a deep sympathy for those who might be different for whatever reason.  Anyone could see this in his choice of actions, acquaintances, and interests. I learned exactly how hard it is to be different anytime I followed his lead.  I remember following in his footsteps literally, when I got my first pair of Birkenstock sandals. I endured a lot of harsh comments about them and just five years later everyone was wearing them. He still had a pair on last week when I visited. He always made friends with people that were of different ages, nationalities, and backgrounds. It taught me such an important lesson on not judging others and learning to see through what others might consider normal. 

Kris loved music and was quite accomplished. He always hated that folks would say he was ‘so talented’ because in his words, he worked for it.  He practiced piano non-stop in our house and won a number of regional piano competitions and scholarships. One of the competition’s scholarship had money attached to it and Kris convinced our parents to go spend the money on synthesizers. Because of this, we always had an assortment of musical instruments in the house. I learned a lot from his musical tastes and by the time I was a teenager I was regularly ‘borrowing’ his cassettes and cd’s. He recorded his first album while in seventh grade with another fella a couple years older than me at our school. I made the cover for those cassettes from a photo I had taken. Later on, he started another band and convinced a crew of fellas that California was the place to be, setting out in his orange 76′ Volkswagen Westfalia Van5 like a band on the run.  He sent me some recent recordings just a couple months ago trying to mentor another fella just getting interested in playing music and he left quite a number of pieces online6. 

Kris excelled at academics. While most people like to act smart, there are those who truly enjoy it.  Kris was one of those people who truly loved learning. After the obligatory afterschool sports of primary school, Kris really preferred to spend his recreational time reading. We went to the library once a week and Kris was knocking out several books a week while in primary school. I remember opening his closet once in my early teens to find that it was stacked from floor to ceiling with hundreds of books he had read.  And mind you that by age fourteen or so he was reading the likes of Stephen King, Issac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, George Orwell, Frank Herbert, and J.R. Tolkien. By high school our dinner table conversations got interesting when he started reading the likes of Aldous Huxley, Aleister Crowley, the Quran, and Bible.  It wasn’t just reading either. I remember one morning on the high school announcements where they congratulated him for placing nationally in a mathematics competition and he aced the SAT with a perfect score.  He was the type of student that his teachers befriended because of his sincere interests in the subjects. He had music and academic scholarships to wherever he wanted to go.  He was invited to attend the Governors School of Science and Mathematics7 the same year I left for college so we essentially left home at the same time. 

Kris and I sorta started college together as roommates.  He wasn’t too thrilled about Governor’s school and our family decided it would be good for us to room together at the College of Charleston since he had been accepted into the honors program before graduating high school.  We only took one class together that year… an 8:00am anthropology class. We read Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches – The Riddles of Culture8. We spent most of our time playing music and making new friends. We performed a version of Woody Guthrie’s Going Down the Road Feeling Bad9 at a coffeeshop. Kris introduced me to ways to explore the metaphysical world and I remember our first Grateful Dead10 concert in the early 90s. The Grateful Dead myth comes from the biblical Book of Tobit where the souls of the dead save the living and the original lead ‘Pigpen’ also suffered from Crohn’s disease.  We spent the evening after the concert with the Rainbow Family11 somewhere nearby.  Kris spent a good bit of time with them and I learned to trust his obscure connections because they almost always led to the most magical places. I think we learned more from that those experiences than from any class I could have taken in college.  Kris bored of college rather quickly and was back out exploring the world. 

From then out, Kris and I would cross paths in various locales over the next fifteen years. We always stayed in touch and he would call every so often from various places explaining his travels. I always found myself defending his adventurous spirit to my parents. I joined him in California for a while and then again up in Montana. He was living out of the cowboy hotel which was an old converted hotel full of a cast of characters renovating it. One Christmas we went snowboarding midweek up in Vermont. We had fresh powder coming down and hardly anyone was there. I remember all of the lift operators having such a good time with us.  Kris had that sorta spiritual guide nature about him where people seemed to just treat him differently. I joined him again in Hawaii. I had bought a one way ticket and by the time I got to Maui, he had already left for the island of Kauai. We met up in Hanalei. I stayed in Hawaii for quite a while and I departed after staying up all night at a party on the west side of Maui and hiking to the top of Mount Haleakala the next morning. An apartment in San Francisco or New York, a remote cabin in the Appalachian mountains, on a ridge on the northern Sierra Nevada mountains, the west entrance to Yellowstone on the offseason, or a remote beach on the north shore of Kauai – those are the types of places I always found Kris.  

Kris returned to the Carolinas for his first marriage. I’m not sure what spurred it, but sure enough they were expecting their first child when I visited. He was living in a cabin up on the side of Black Mountain outside of Asheville and she had decided to have their child in a tub on the porch. They managed to pull it off in a snowstorm with no assistance from the midwife.  I’m sure that was an adventure in itself. For what I could imagine might be a litany of reasons, that marriage didn’t work out and Kris moved on to his second wife and had three more children.  By this time, I had started doing work with computers and I encouraged him to join the fray because of the money.  He was really talented with computers too and was soon coding circles around me. At my referral he moved back to Charleston and started doing software development.  He had a good salary, a new car, a suburban house, and he was teaching his girls to surf almost everyday. I was kinda surprised and thought that the wondaring bug was finally gone and he would settle into adulthood nicely.  That fell apart too, he moved on to another gal and had one last child.  One afternoon, I get a text photo of him on a beach. I ask where and he responds Nicaragua. He calls and tells me that he’s bought a motorcycle and is planning on traveling around for a while possibly heading down to South America. Although I was tempted to join him again, I never did.  

A year later he moved to West Texas out in the middle of nowhere near Lubbock. He would text me country music, funny memes, and random photos on occasion.  He got a pet snake and a big Stetson hat he liked to wear.  He set up an online radio station for my dad and uncle, and we would occasionally do a show together as well.  I’ve attached a recording of us discussing the merits of Insane Clown Posse below12. I joined him again in San Antonio a year later and we went to see Ray Wylie Hubbard at Gruene, Texas’ oldest dance hall13.  He was using a walker by this time and his health was severely deteriorating. For the next year, we regularly exchanged texts and phone calls. During the last year, he spent more time in the hospital than not. Even in the hospital, he would brag about how nice the views were of the city. He went up to John Hopkins in New York for chemo and an experimental genetic treatment last year. We talked a bit more seriously over the last year and I could feel it coming. I’m glad I had the chance to visit him one last time as I think we had been preparing ourselves for the inevitable. I’m glad that he passed relatively peacefully and my heart goes out to his children Aren, Rose, Sylvia, Ruby, Lydia, their moms, his wife, step-children, and my parents.

Kristopher Roland Windham: 1975-2021 

Epilogue

Kris was a very spiritual person and regularly used spiritual terms in conversation. He had a bumper sticker on the back of two of his vehicles that read “Not All Who Wander Are Lost” which quoted J.R.R. Tolkien’s poem The Riddle of Strider from The Fellowship of the Ring14.  My sympathies to anyone who’s ever tried to argue with me because I learned from the best growing up with Kris. I think polymath might be an appropriate description although Kris told me on several occasions that it really ‘fucked him up by everyone telling him he was so smart’.  By the time we were coming of age so to speak, Kris was deeply into the ideas that were far beyond his years… existentialism, transcendentalism, hermeticism, gnosticism, and panpsychism.  Being that my mom was somewhat religious in the Anglican practice, our dinner table conversations would get heavy because he had read the Bible many more times and was a decent scholar on it and other religions.  I remember him discussing religion one night and my mom about went into an epileptic fit over it.  I mostly stayed out of it, but I never once really doubted his experience or knowledge.

Each time I traveled to see Kris it was almost always accompanied by some sort of metaphysical transformation usually spurred on by our relationship. As I returned from Texas last week, every song ever written about a wandering cowboy came to mind. His wife told me about a time not too long ago that he said he was going to walk to Mexico and I can definitely imagine him out crossing the Texas landscape.  In Montana, I spent a week camping in the same place that A River Runs Through It15 was filmed.  That book explores very closely my relationship with Kris and the idea that “It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us. You can love completely without complete understanding”… “Yet even in the loneliness of the canyon I knew there were others like me who had brothers they did not understand but wanted to help. We are probably those referred to as “our brother’s keepers,” possessed of one of the oldest and possible one of the most futile and certainly one of the most haunting instincts. It will not let us go.” “All there is to thinking is seeing something noticeable which makes you see some thing you weren’t noticing which makes you see something that isn’t even visible.”  And although not necessarily Puff’s Honalee16, I couldn’t help but think about the poem camping along the north shore of the Nepali coastline near Hanalei Hawaii that “A dragon lives forever but not so little boys” and the loss of the imagination of childhood as I contemplated my return to normalcy in the Carolinas.

Kris sent me a copy of The Brothers Karamazov17 as a wedding gift some years ago and in it he wrote a dedication to me in Russian that it was his favorite book. I’ve been seriously mulling through the themes in that book over the last month. When I first read it, I skimmed a lot and didn’t pay much attention. I had read Crime and Punishment at the request of the former head of the lit department at Boston University saying it was the best piece of literature ever written so I felt like I already knew Dostoevsky.  What I didn’t consider was that Kris was so deeply moved by this book because his own life mirrored those themes. Considering redemption, spirituality, and your own mortality from a very young age might do that to you.  Kris joins a pretty strong group of others in his opinion. It was Einstein and Freud’s favorite, Camus, Sartre, and Huxley cited and Kurt Vonnegut wrote “everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov”. 

“Brother, I’m not depressed and haven’t lost spirit. Life everywhere is life, life is in ourselves and not in the external. There will be people near me, and to be a human being among human beings, and remain one forever, no matter what misfortunes befall, not to grow despondent, and not to lose heart – this is what life is, herein lies its task.”… ”Now, changing my life, I’m being regenerated into a new form. Brother! I swear to you that I won’t lose hope and will preserve my heart and spirit in purity. I’ll be reborn for the better. That’s my entire hope, my entire consolation.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky in a letter to his brother Mikhail after being arrested for being part of a secret utopian society and sent to a hard labor camp in Siberia.

There is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People take to you a great deal about education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is saved to the end of his days. And even if only one good memory remains with us in our hearts, that alone may serve some day for our salvation.”  – Alyosha Karamazov The Brothers Karamazov

In 2007 Pope Benedict XVI’s Spe Saliv cited it with “Grace does not cancel out justice. It does not make wrong into right. It is not a sponge which wipes everything away, so that whatever someone has done on earth ends up being of equal value. Dostoevsky, for example, was right to protest against this kind of Heaven and this kind of grace in his novel The Brothers Karamazov”.  “Est autem fides sperandarum substantia rerum, argumentum non apparentium”. ( Faith is the substance of things hoped for; the proof of things not seen ) The book implies that Jesus, in giving humans freedom to choose, has excluded the majority of humanity from redemption and doomed it to suffer. His acceptance of suffering as a condition of life emphasizes the importance of living life as an unending journey, in allocating importance to the search for an answer, and not necessarily in the answer itself.  

Kris was not lost nor will he ever be to those who knew him.  The last decent conversation we had was when I spoke to him on the phone a couple weeks before he died. He was having multiple organ failure and didn’t want to be put on a transplant list. He was trying to tell me that he was done with this earthly life. I told him that “I loved him, supported his decision, and to just look at it like your next adventure because I’ll catch up with you soon enough like I always do”.  I will always admire my brother’s spirit and in a way, I’m very happy that part of it is still alive in his children. I will try my best to keep that spirit alive. I know that I was very lucky to have him as my brother as he made me a better man because of it.  

A Poem for My Brother

reconcile
relics of the past
harmony found

brother
ascetic to know peace
blessing to share your life

redemption
lifted from this earth

  1. Kristopher Kristofferson – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kris_Kristofferson 
  2. Hitchhikers Guide Computer Game – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy_(video_game) 
  3. Middle-earth Role Playing – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle-earth_Role_Playing 
  4. Crohn’s Disease – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crohn%27s_disease 
  5. VW Westfalia Campervan – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Westfalia_Camper 
  6. Kris online – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9f3XDrIHxQPQLa7OT_mjhQ , https://soundcloud.com/krwindham , https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC08wmSDCwlI8XDsBvnXy14w , http://commandlinejunkie.com , http://kriswindham.com
  7. SC Governor’s School – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Carolina_Governor%27s_School_for_Science_and_Mathematics
  8. Cows, Pigs, Wars, & Witches – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Harris 
  9. Going Down the Road Feeling Bad – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_Down_the_Road_Feeling_Bad 
  10. Grateful Dead – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grateful_Dead
  11. Rainbow Tribe – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Family 
  12. Kris & David clip – https://davidawindham.com/wha/Kris_David_Windham.mp3
  13. Ray Wylie Hubbard at Gruene Hall – https://davidawindham.com/media/ray_wylie.mp4
  14. All That Glitters is Not Gold – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_that_glitters_is_not_gold 
  15. A River Runs Through It – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_River_Runs_Through_It_(novel) 
  16. Puff, the Magic Dragon – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puff,_the_Magic_Dragon
  17. The Brothers Karamazov – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brothers_Karamazov 

Update: 22/11/21 – I just reworked and moved Kris’ old domain over to one of my hosts so that I could publish his recordings for anyone who might want to listen. There are currently 101 original recordings of mostly piano, keyboard and electronic tracks. It’s available @ https://kriswindham.com