Kristen and Erik at Dad's graduation from William and Mary - Spring 1975
 
Kristen Halvorsen Hamilton, Erik's sister, spoke first. She said:

Thank you all for coming today. Some of you are here today to lend my parents and me support, which we greatly appreciate and for that we thank you. But most of you are here today because you knew and loved Erik.

Erik was a private, quiet person to many, but those who truly knew him couldn't help but love him. He was an intelligent, sensitive person with a keen sense of humor and unique points of view which we will all miss. Erik was the smartest person I have ever known. As his older sister, I naturally felt responsible for keeping my little brother happy and busy - he was so temperamental as a baby that I sometimes called him "Earache," but he was always happy when we were playing together. When we were very small, we used to play "school" with a chalkboard Dad put in my bedroom and he learned to read at a very young age; in fact it was potty training which kept him out of Montessori school when he was itching to learn more. While I helped teach him as a child, in recent years he loved to compete with me at Trivial Pursuit (although I could usually still stump him with an Arts and Entertainment question, he knew almost every other category). Although I like to think of myself as well-read and well-spoken, he trounced me in Scrabble almost constantly. I lost points challenging him in words I had never heard of. Erik also had a real knack for crunching numbers, which manifested itself in some strange ways when he was young. He and Brian Weber would create clay baseball teams to play against one another and Erik would spend hours, at six and seven years old, compiling statistics. One year, I remember, he kept count of how many times he sneezed each day, every day. As an adult, his love for math helped him with his online fantasy baseball teams, and in his work as an accountant.

Erik's genius was not without its downside - he inherited my father's stubbornness and my mother's drive for achievement, and this combination could sometimes be powerful. When he developed a theory, there was no way to talk him out of it. His thoughts on religion were entirely his own, which is why we have not had a more formal gathering today. He and Dad often butted heads in their similarities. I remember one summer when I was home from college, and Dad and Erik left for a week-long trip to New England to visit potential universities Erik might want to attend. The night after they left, Mom and I were coming home from a mother-daughter dinner only to see Dad and Erik pulling into the driveway. They had driven about eight hours up to see the first school, and Erik didn't want to get out of the car, only see the campus from the outside. Dad, of course, wanted him to tour the dorms, talk to the students, maybe sit in on a class - which was not Erik's style. Dad and Erik had a huge argument, and after a night at a hotel, they turned right around and came back home, without speaking during the entire trip. Erik ended up attending Boston College, as most of you know, but again his stubborn genius flared up - during one semester, he was convinced he could teach himself better than any of his professors could, and dropped out of all of his classes to spend every waking hour at the library or reading literature and philosophy in his room. In his defense, he probably did learn a lot more during that time than anyone could actively teach him - he read nearly a dozen books a day.

Erik's drive to succeed was innate, and I was grateful he followed me in school and not vice versa. In my belief, he was so intelligent that he had to challenge himself in order to feel success. While never fanatical, he tackled a problem every way he knew how in order to find a solution. This was most often seen in his schooling and his sports. I remember travelling to Canada for our winter vacations, while I was in college and Erik was in high school, and I would drill him on his German lessons. We had entire conversations in German, and Erik strove to put the relatively few words he knew together in a way that made grammatical sense if not contextual - I used to ask him for years about Ulrike the lizard who lived in his head. Anyone who ever skiied with Erik was privy to a glimpse into his psyche - since a child, his ambitions were to get to the bottom faster and with better form than the previous run. He had no fear of injury, which often worried Mom, but it didn't take long before he outskiied the rest of us and we would find him at the bottom waiting for us. Erik was as devoted to his other sports - since Mom thought football was too violent, he took up ice hockey and soccer - and, last I heard, his school record in swimming was still on the walls of the NAHS pool.

Erik's brilliant mind wasn't the first thing most people noticed about him, though, it was his sense of humor. Anyone who ever received a crank phone call from him knows what I mean … not too long ago, I picked up a voicemail message consisting of only heavy breathing. My immediate response was to call Erik and say, "what did you want?" He was always disappointed when I guessed him out, although there have been times that I've almost scolded attorneys calling with a particularly whiny, odd question with, "Erik, cut it out!"

Growing up in our home, with a prankster like my father, though, it was impossible for Erik's funny side not to flourish. Erik was one of the few people in this world who knew what it felt like to actually win the lottery, thanks to the time Dad slipped in a newly-bought lottery ticket showing the winning numbers of the previous day along with the tickets he and Erik had bought on the previous day, and asked Erik to check the numbers on their tickets against the winners published in the newspaper. Erik's jubilation was not to be contained, even though Mom and I couldn't believe it and knew Dad was up to something. Erik loved to make up jokes, especially those which relied on bad puns he had thought of, and his sense of humor was spontaneous and quirky. Only this past summer he came to see "The Sixth Sense" with my husband Bob and me, and during a particularly suspenseful scene of the movie, he grabbed my arm with that elfish look on his face which told me he only wanted to make me jump. Erik's sense of humor sometimes backfired, though. The first time we met my parents' friend Golda after the death of her husband was a most memorable occasion. My parents decided to try to make Golda's Christmas less lonely and convinced her to come along on our ski trip to Canada. She was late in arriving to our house, as usual, so we decided to wrap up our leftover hoagies so she could eat before bed and an early departure the next morning. Mom told Erik to mark the hoagies with freezer tape and write on them what they were ... Erik was so busy naming them "dead squirrel" and other funny things that the word "freezer" stuck in his head and, without thinking, he put them in the freezer instead of the refrigerator. By the time Golda arrived, she was ravenous, and the hoagies were half frozen. Erik thought to remedy the situation and microwaved a hoagie to defrost it for her. To make a long story short, the mayonnaise turned, and she was sick all night with food poisoning and the most miserable person I have ever seen in the back of the station wagon, for the entire way to Canada. But she told me to mention that she loved Erik dearly anyway and has completely forgiven him for trying to poison her. In fact, she only found out about his death when she returned from California at 4:00 this morning and moved the ends of the earth to be here with us today.

I thought Erik would have made a great career as a stand-up comedian, and all through the past few days, I've still been expecting to feel his finger tap on my shoulder and when I whirl around to find him standing on the other side.

The other career I had picked for my brother was that of a veterinarian, since he adored animals of all kinds. He said he couldn't do it, though, because he couldn't stand to see animals in pain, even if he was helping to heal them. His love for animals also had its quirky sides - at times he became a strict vegetarian despite his love of cheesesteaks, and when my dogs would come to visit he used to take off their collars and seatbelt harnesses because he hated to see them fettered in any way. He never disciplined them with so much as a harsh word, even when my 75-pound golden retriever climbed into his lap and stood there. This care for animals extended past the tamed ones. In 1992, Bob and I were in charge of collecting him from his dorm room at BC and bringing him and his belongings home in the family station wagon, completely loaded down to the cartop carrier. We all took turns driving, and when Erik took his turn, we all had a scare as he swerved the huge vehicle from the left lane of the Massachussetts turnpike onto the shoulder to avoid a low-flying bird. After that, Erik lost his driving privileges with us and Bob drove the rest of the way home, but part of me remembers that day and wonders whether it was Erik's concern for a dog or a squirrel in the road that brought us all here today.

While Erik left us on Christmas Eve, we will try to remember him with happiness as he was: a brother and son to our family. I know we will always remember this Christmas Eve with sadness, as we remember so many other Christmas Eves with laughter. My favorite was the year that Erik and I were very small and we were preparing cookies and milk and our note for Santa. Suddenly I happened to glance out the back window of my parents' home at the radio tower we had seen a thousand times before, but the flashing red light on top suddenly took on a new meaning and we instantly forgot the tower's existence. I grabbed Erik's arm and said, "Look! It's Rudolf!" and we both fled up the stairs and right into bed, feigning sleep with our hearts pounding. Mom really had no idea where we'd gone when she turned around.

The one thing Erik never could learn for certain was what happened in the afterlife, but we're sure he knows even that now too, and we all know he is in a better place now.

As someone once said, "We must live with sadness, but we need not live sadly." On behalf of my family, I want to thank everyone again for coming, and encourage you all to share with us your happy memories of Erik here today.