Another Sad Pedestrian Death
Posted Sep. 5 at 10:29 am by Mark Fefer
Five years ago, for our Valentine's Day issue, we did a piece called Love Against the Odds—profiles of couples who had defied time, cliche, and convention. I wrote about Jackie and PJ McCraw, whom I'd met at a friend's party in North Seattle—both of them blind, and with three sighted kids. They were amazing in their humility, given all that they'd overcome. And just plain charming. They both worked downtown, near SW's office, and I've often seen them since, accompanied by their dogs.
Well, last week Jackie was killed in a freak accident. She was walking next to Aurora Ave. with her Golden Retriever when a driver had a seizure and hit another car, which then went up onto the sidewalk and hit her. She died in the hospital. Today is her funeral up at Evergreen Washelli.
The profile of Jackie and PJ is after the jump.
How many of us look to marry someone who'll make our lives easier? Someone rich or connected, someone who offers comfort, someone who balances what we lack? In some ways, Jackie and P.J. McCraw seem to fit the complementary pattern: Around the dining-room table of their North Seattle house, their personalities form a combined picture of warmth and humor, shared but distinct intelligence, modesty and bullheaded determination. But Jackie and P.J., both blind, took the farthest thing from the easy route, a marriage of different skin colors and common challenge.
"My family was real opposed" to the union, says Jackie, who grew up in Spokane, "because of the race issue and the blind issue. They wanted me to marry a sighted person, someone who'd protect me and keep me safe. It has been more difficult, I won't deny that."
In 28 years of marriage, Jackie and P.J. have lived in Australia (where they got married), traveled through Asia, and raised three sighted kids—two biological daughters and one adopted son. ("We'd pin bells on their backs when they were babies," says P.J., "and if it was too quiet for too long, we'd check on them.")
Fixed up by the owner of the Spud Nut doughnut shop in the U District in the late '60s—when P.J. was working on his doctorate in geology and Jackie was working for Washington's Department of Health Services, teaching old people how to cope with declining vision—Jackie and P.J. say that in some ways the blindness they share has saved them from some of the difficulties of a "mixed" marriage. "There's a lot of tug-of-war that goes on in sighted-blind couples," says Jackie. "The sighted person feels put-upon, and to some extent, that's true." "It's so much harder for people who go blind later in life," says P.J. "Very few marriages survive that. The roles change—it's a major social upheaval."
Yet the common ground of blindness only goes so far. "What makes our relationship work is we consider each other to be best friends," says P.J. "As long as we keep accepting each other as individuals, and as a couple, I think we'll be all right."
Topics: News
