Still beloved.

Jacqueline Cross, age 16, in the pool where she taught so many youngsters to swim.

(This is the text of a Facebook post I wrote earlier today. For those that have left Facebook, and I may soon be one of you, I repeat the post here with additional photos.)

Some may wonder why I still make note of the birthday of a long-dead woman with whom I spent only about three years in a sometimes loving, sometimes tumultuous relationship when I was in high school and college. Sometimes I wonder myself. After all, almost a half-century has passed since those fleeting moments — and 35 years since her death, when breast cancer took her away from her husband and four children.

Well, maybe it’s because Jacqueline Cross did more than almost anyone else in my life outside of a precious few to set me on a correct course for adulthood. Maybe it’s because she saw what was good in me and what needed molding and maturing. Maybe it’s because when I changed schools between sixth and seventh grade, she became one of the first people I didn’t previously know to befriend a shy, introverted and desperately-approval-seeking outcast whose personal development had somehow been sidetracked by six years of oppressive Catholic education.

Before the prom in 1971.

She became my friend when I needed to learn what friendship was all about. And then she became so much more.

I’ve stopped blaming myself for not being ready emotionally for the commitment she asked of me as we became young adults, together in unfamiliar surroundings a thousand miles from home. She had made the trek to college with me against all advice, trying to support me when she probably should have been looking to fulfill a life course all her own without the pain that resulted from our separation. But it’s all water under the bridge. Nothing can change what happened, much as I wish I could have done some things differently and more respectfully of her.

I will always fondly remember a reconciliatory meeting at her northern Illinois home nearly 12 years later, where old wounds were healed and acceptance was achieved. And I thank the powers behind our fates that that meeting took place before she learned that cancer was going to take her from her family in short order.

Playing in a boys vs. girls exhibition game at our new gym
in 1971, against classmate Sel Stearns (wearing a girls' uniform).

I grieved, disproportionately to the tenure of our actual relationship. But in the years that followed our breakup and then her death, I found ways for her memory to motivate me positively. Her life as an athlete in an era in which women were regarded as second-class citizens for being able to dribble a basketball spurred me to embrace the national legislation called Title IX, which guaranteed equal opportunity for women in athletics. My role was to equalize the coverage of boys’ and girls’ sports in the newspaper for which I worked, as a means of developing interest in the girls’ teams and creating an environment in which young girls would know they would receive respectful recognition for what they did. Today, no one would think twice about basketball stories that give equal play to the boys and girls. But in 1977, when my career began, it was heresy among many men that thought they were losing their dominant position in the sports world. I took a lot of crap from a lot of ignoramuses during those early years — and yet, as poetic justice would dictate, many of them would have daughters and then thank us profusely for spotlighting their careers.

It was all because of Jackie. All because on one day in 1970, when I was working part-time for the local weekly newspaper and she asked me why I never came to her games, I said, “it’s only girls’ basketball.” That’s when I saw the look of deep hurt on her face that would be burned into my memory forever. It was a memory that steeled me against ever causing other young women athletes to feel the same way.

There have been many times when I looked at stories I wrote, chronicling the greatest moments in local girls’ sports, that I wish I could tell Jackie that it was all because of her that I made this my life’s work.

I probably should have let go of her a long time ago, even long before her death on April 16, 1986, at the age of 33. All the wonderful women I met over the years always had to bear an unfair comparison to her. But again, it was in her memory that I accepted women as true equals in every walk of life, and vowed to throw off the shackles of a classic 1950s American upbringing to embrace a future that may finally be starting to fully arrive.

Cullen Park in Grayslake, Ill., named after Jackie.

Her parents are gone. So is her husband. And fortunately, I never sought to learn much about her children’s lives. That wasn’t my business. However, I did indulge myself in making occasional pilgrimages to her gravesite within Calvary Cemetery in Chicago, one of the coldest and least hospitable places  on the continent. There is no stone to mark her final resting place, just a small concrete family plot marker. To this day, I wonder why not. But I have some consolation in knowing that the  town of Grayslake, Ill., named a small children’s playground after her, to commemorate her short but beloved tenure as its recreation director before her illness overtook her.

Today would have been Jackie’s 68th birthday. But as the first photo accompanying this post illustrates, she remains forever young in my memories. Maybe a blessing, maybe a curse ... but it’s my choice to live with both.