Charles Raymond Cardinaux

Charles “Joc” Raymond Cardinaux died peacefully at home on July 6, 2025, after living with Lewy Body Dementia for eight years. He is survived by his wife Gray Wilson and his son Charles “Charlie” Cardinaux, as well as his sister Isabelle Schnydrig of Zurich, Switzerland. 

Ever the non-conformist, Joc followed his own path through life with a sense of adventure and curiosity. He was born in beautiful Switzerland, where he developed a love of skiing and the outdoors and spoke both French and Swiss-German as part of a multilingual household. Soon after completing his welding apprenticeship in Luzern and taking some basic English classes, he chose to emigrate to the United States in 1964 at the age of 24. 

He was drawn to the freedom and openness of America and had a drive to explore his vast new country. He worked for a year in New Jersey to satisfy his immigration requirements, but as soon as the year was over he hit the road. Over the next decade, he worked and traveled throughout the country, spending time in California, Colorado, Alaska, and Georgia before purchasing property in Virginia and Florida as part of the back-to-the-land movement in the mid-1970s.

While in California he adopted the nickname “Joc” because it reminded him of something his mother called him as a child, and also because to his ear it sounded like “Chuck”, an American nickname for Charles. He became a U.S. citizen in 1974 and met his future wife Gray at a natural foods co-op in southwest Virginia in the late 1970s. They had a son Charlie and moved to North Carolina in 1986, living first in Asheville and then in the Winston-Salem area. Following Joc’s diagnosis with Lewy Body Dementia in 2017, he and his wife moved to Tacoma, Washington to be near their son in Seattle. 

One of Joc’s favorite activities can best be described as “foraging” and is reflective of his openness to the world and its possibilities. He loved to bring home unwanted or abandoned items, from scrap metal to broken bicycles to downed branches for the wood-burning stove. He would happily strike up a conversation with anyone who seemed open to it, often chatting for hours with someone he met by chance in the town square, or with his neighbor in the adjoining seat on his flights back to Switzerland to visit family.

After moving to Washington his abilities became more limited, but he maintained his curiosity and love of the outdoors, taking long walks with his wife around their home in Tacoma and in Point Defiance Park. The landscape of Washington, with its mountains reminiscent of the Swiss Alps, reminded him and his family of the beautiful country he had left behind but loved dearly.