Kresten Wolff: A magic man who spun copper into gold | John Moore
A COLORADO LIFE
In a lifetime of theatergoing, one line of dialogue has reverberated through the years and my ears more than any other:
“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”
It’s from Joan Didion’s stage memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking.” She’s ruminating on the sudden death of her husband.
It happens in every (good) play. That moment when the plot irrevocably shifts and hurtles the story in a wholly unexpected and often thrilling new direction.
It happens in every life, too – but more often to catastrophic effect.
Life changed for perhaps thousands in the ordinary instant of Feb. 5, when a man driving a pickup truck ran a red light and plowed into the car of a man driving his two kids home from school along a residential Arvada street. The collision was so violent, Kresten Wolff Thomsen’s Toyota sedan came to a stop through the broken brick wall of a neighboring house.
Wolff, a prolific musician and composer with the Colorado Ballet Academy, died from his injuries. He was only 44.
His children, 10 and 7, were seriously hurt. Arvada Police believe the other driver, 23-year-old Juan Ortega Torres Jr., was drunk when he caused the collision – at 3:40 on a Monday afternoon. Torres has been charged with two counts of vehicular homicide, four counts of vehicular assault and driving under the influence.
More than 700 people die in Colorado car fatalities every year, each with a story that doesn’t always get told. Wolff’s unlikely tale is joyful, eviscerating and filled to the brim with love and music.
He was celebrated on Thursday in an overflow service at Arvada Vineyard, a church that’s only about a mile from where he died. About 450 attended in person, and another 1,000 have watched online from Denmark, Norway, Germany, Sweden, Canada and elsewhere. One couple watched separately – the man from Buffalo; the woman from Ontario.
Friends and family came to Arvada from all over the world to tell this man’s story, including his childhood music teachers from Denmark. One by one, they punctured the crushingly sad weight of it all with laughter, music and stories of indefatigable positivity. They painted a picture of an impossibly jovial man with a goofy grin who spread the joy of music throughout his life as if musical notes were just so many Biblical good seeds.
He was a man with more best friends than most people have friends. Who happily danced through life like fingers floating atop a keyboard. He was the human antidote to depression. Who described himself as “an untreatable enjoyer of life.”
And why not? He had everything anyone could ever want in life.
He had the love of a woman who is as effortlessly positive as he was. Alicia Castillo Wolff is a registered nurse whose stated goal in life “is to bring joy and light to the world.” The couple were married in 2011 and lived in three countries together. On the occasion of their 10th anniversary, Kresten called their marriage “a breathtaking, sparkling and magical adventure.”
“We have seen so many great places on Earth, walked through both sunny and dull days, and have learned and lived in dimensions we would never have imagined,” he wrote.
He also had their two children. He had his infectious passion for music. He had a dream job to bring that same passion to legions of dance students who clearly adored him.
Perhaps most of all, he had perspective. Because the couple’s happiness did not go unchallenged. But no matter what, the pair remained firmly rooted together in the land of the light.
“We have seen the best and the hardest parts of life together,” Kresten wrote in 2021. “We have two amazing children and one unborn dancing happily around in Heaven waiting for us.”
Talk about perspective.
Somehow, Wolff’s wife summoned the strength of Samson and spoke at the memorial gathering on Thursday. It seemed as if her mission was to bring comfort to others, not the other way around.
And, like Didion, she had magic on her mind.
“Kresten was magic,” Castillo Wolff began. “From the moment we met, his explosive joy hit my heart.” Friends who saw the two together in their earliest days will swear there were sparkles surrounding them.
Castillo Wolff described a husband who woke up most mornings jolly. He’d rouse the kids from bed and fly them around the room. “Birthdays always meant waking up the kiddos with the accordion, singing both the American and the Danish birthday songs,” she said.
He made mundane moments special, and he made special occasions unforgettable. He had big plans for April to mark what the Dutch call a couple’s copper anniversary (that’s 12½ years – exactly halfway to 25) with a whirlwind trip to New York, the arts capital of the world.
And he always had his guitar and his accordion at his side. “Because of his music, our house was always filled with so much life and energy,” said Castillo Wolff, who sometimes wondered to herself: “How is he real? How am I the luckiest person that I caught his attention and his love?”
No wonder they ended up together. They are two peas in a pod of spotless eternal sunshine.
The family moved to Colorado in 2019 to be closer to Alicia’s family. But instead of being a fish out of water in a strange land, Kresten brought his uniquely magical waters with him – and he invited everyone he met to jump in with him, where the water was always fine.
Gil Boggs, the artistic director of Colorado Ballet, said Wolff arrived unannounced on his door and introduced himself in the summer of 2019. “Little did I know right there at that moment that an incredibly special gem had just walked into our building,” Boggs said.
Kresten told him simply: “I’ve moved here from Denmark, and I used to be a pianist with the Royal Danish Ballet,” Boggs said. Needless to say, that got his immediate attention. The RDB, after all, is an international icon in the dance world. Wolff’s impeccable credentials also included studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Music and the University of Copenhagen.
Still, Boggs would have to see for himself if Wolff had the chops for the job, so he invited this beaming stranger to play in a youth class. By the end of that session, as Colorado Ballet Academy Director Erica Fischbach put it: “Everyone in the room was dancing to the music of ABBA, ‘Greased Lightning’ and ‘Downton Abbey.’”
Not your typical ballet music.
By this point in Thursday’s deceptively cheerful memorial celebration, a few things were perfectly plain: First, that there was absolutely no apparent family furor toward the suspect, whose dangerous and deadly choices have forever altered so many lives – most impactfully, a 10-year-old girl and her 7-year-old brother.
Also: That this is a deeply Christian family being held closely within the protective bosom of a larger, deeply Christian community. Their focus on this day was steeped in the kind of serenity you only really find among those who have an unwavering belief in what comes next.
“There are no easy answers why this happened,” said family friend Michael Holguin, “but it’s not God who caused it to happen. We don’t know what the driver was thinking or doing or what led up to him being in that condition to cause such a tragedy. But in no way, shape or form does it reflect poorly on God.”
Still, one can only imagine how children can ever truly process such a monumental loss, especially while also healing their own physical wounds. The Arvada woman who owned the house that was damaged by the crash told me that hearing Wolff’s young son calling out for his father from the car is something she will never forget.
But at the memorial, Holguin told a remarkably restorative story.
“Here’s how their kids understand sacrifice and love,” he said. “When Ella was in the hospital after the accident, she turned to (her mother) and said: ‘Dad died protecting us.’”
Out of the mouth of babes.
Ella understood that, Holguin said, because she knows her father’s favorite Biblical quote, from John 15:13: “There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”
Or children.
“Kresten would have done that,” Holguin said. “It would’ve been automatic for him to put himself in harm’s way.”
Editor’s note: A GoFundMe campaign to support Alicia Castillo Wolff and her two children has raised nearly $175,000.
