Christopher Curtis Nerode

Christopher Curtis Nerode (later legally known as Nicholas Spencer Nerode) was born in Chicago, Illinois on March 26, 1957. He died unexpectedly in Binghamton, New York on June 9, 2025 of natural causes. His parents were Anil and Sondra Doone Raines Nerode (later Sondra Gebhart Irvine). In his youth he much enjoyed family trips around the world to destinations such as Melbourne and the Great Barrier Reef, Borobudur Temple, India, Nepal and Pakistan, Athens and the Peloponnese, with his father and his father's second wife Sally Sievers and sometimes Sally's mother Caroline Sievers. With his grandmother Agnes Spencer Nerode, he also explored her native Southwest.

He was a graduate of Ithaca High School, where he was very active on the Tattler, and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Cornell University. He worked for some years in a Chicago hospital to address a hopeless backlog of hundreds of thousands of unpaid bills. In Chicago he was close to both of his paternal grandparents, Sri and Agnes Nerode, and his uncle Kiron. (Sri Nerode (1889-1983), was a Bengali Yogi, Sanskrit scholar, and lecturer. He was second director of Mother Center for the Self Realization Fellowship at Mt. Washington. "Sri Nerode" was the name given by Swami Yogananda to Nirad Ranjan Roy Chowdhury. It was later legally changed from Chowdhury to Nerode for the whole family to eliminate confusion.) The record of family Yogis stretches from the Mughal dynasty (1500) to the Partition of India (1947). Through his later life Christopher felt in direct philosophical communication with his deceased paternal grandfather Sri Nerode.

After Chicago, he returned to upstate New York for the rest of his life.

He was a writer and poet, a flaneur, a studier of languages; he had a rich imaginative life. In Ithaca his long-term closest friend Hatice Brenton drove him and his younger brother Gregory on many local expeditions over many years.

Dying before him were his Nerode grandparents, grandmother Arden Raines, Caroline Sievers, his brother Gregory Nerode in 2022, and his mother in 2024. He is survived by his father Anil Nerode, his stepmother Sally Sievers, his younger half-brother Nathanael Nerode, his half-sister Lorna Gebhart Welde, his uncles Kiron Nerode (Chicago) and Robin Nerode (Berkeley), and his dear friend Hatice Brenton.