Douglas O’Brien Jackson

Douglas O’Brien Jackson died of early-onset Parkinson’s dementia on May 5, 2016. He wore a 16-34/35 neck in a dress shirt. It was hard to fit his lanky long arms off the rack, but he refused to wear short sleeves. He favored socks in a cotton/poly blend because they supposedly held up better. One day, when he was around 40, he decided to take up running—in black cotton/poly socks and loafers and Sears dungarees. He ran for years until he started getting lost. An engineer, mechanic, and instrument-rated pilot, Doug designed arcane bits of circuitry for Boeing, contributing to patents for things with names like “throttle split monitor for aircraft with intermix engines.” Those bits still might be getting you home from your vacations. It may be that circuitry made sense to him in a way that people did not. He spent much of the 80s in the garage, KIXI on the radio, tinkering with a VariEze kit plane. He never finished it. It’s possible he’d always wanted to be like Chuck Yeager; or maybe Warren Miller.

Doug was a Christian Scientist, which might have meant that, like the rest of us, he was looking for peace for an unruly mind and body. He was a dedicated member of the First Church of Christ Scientist on Mercer Island, where he acted as usher and sometime sound system engineer. Mercer Island was a place where he and his wife, the late Patricia Lou Jackson, carved out a spot by Lake Washington to build a house with a cedar beam and a red brick fireplace. On the lake floated his 22-foot sailboat, moored to a concrete-filled tire sunk to the bottom. Doug liked hot dogs and popcorn and Ivar’s clam chowder and preferred butter to mayonnaise on his sandwiches. He could be a melancholy man and was not always easy to know. His illness meant that his daughters, Joy Walker and Claire Jackson, had been missing him for years. That night, as the earth traveled through what Halley’s comet left behind, we looked up at the sky to see sparks wink on, then off.

Doug’s family, which also includes his sisters, Susan Gammicchia of Rochester, Michigan and Nancy Camillone of Scarsdale, New York, and his brother, Andrew Jackson of Royal Oak, Michigan, ask that donations be made to the Lewy Body Dementia Association in lieu of flowers.