How do you cope with death? What can you do other than pick up the shattered memories and try to move on? Who was Christopher Bowne? He was a brother, a son, a nephew and a grandson. He was a dear friend to many people, and his memory will be cherished.
“I will never forget the time I had freshly painted one of my bedrooms, and Christopher and his brother came over,” Chris’ aunt Lavonne Buenning recalled. “It was around lunchtime and I fed them bologna sandwiches. They were horsing around in the bedroom when I went to check on them. I asked them if they had finished their lunch and Christopher said yes he did. I turned around and he had the bologna stuck on the wall, my freshly painted wall. I said ‘Christopher did you do that?’ I looked at him and he had this little boy grin and was just like ‘Nope, not me.’ And I know he did it because his brother was still having his sandwich.”
Western was one of Chris’ first choices upon completing high school, Chris’ mother Roberta Bowne said, but he was denied admission the first time he applied.
“He was delayed in entering Western because at the time you guys had full enrollment,” Roberta Bowne said. “He wrote a letter back and said, ‘I really think I can benefit Western by coming to your college.’ Western’s reply to him was, ‘Go get your [associate degree] and we will reserve a spot for you in your junior year.”
Chris received his associate degree from Bellevue College and transferred to Western this fall. Just eight days after the start of the quarter he was discovered in the smoldering wreckage of his car off Lake Terrell Road, in Ferndale.
“All we can say, my wife and I, is that Chris was such a great young man,” Chris’ uncle Todd Bowne said. “We loved him so much. It is such a loss to our family. I sure wish that he could have had more time to spend there at Western. He was really looking forward to that.”
Christopher Kelley Bowne was born to David and Roberta Bowne on May 19, 1989 in Seattle where they lived together in the same house for 20 years.
“He followed his heart to accomplish his goals,” David Bowne said. “It was that love, compassion, desire, dedication and discipline that Chris had that his friends will carry on for the rest of their lives.”
His childhood friend Elle de la Cruz, a Whitman College student who attended preschool through eighth grade with Chris, said Chris was like a brother to her. She said he would do anything he could think of to make the whole classroom laugh.
“He used to imitate our eighth-grade teacher all the time,” de la Cruz said. “Mr. Rittman always used to wear the same thing: jeans, a plaid button-up shirt and a Seattle Mariners hat. One day Chris showed up wearing the exact same thing, and he was talking like him and acting like him. Our teacher thought it was really funny too. Chris was just out to have a good time.”
Though Chris often played the class clown, de la Cruz said he was compassionate when it mattered.
“I remember when one of our classmate’s grandpas died. Chris volunteered to help with the funeral,” de la Cruz said. “That was the thing about Chris. Even though he would joke around all the time in the end he just wanted to make people happy.”
Chris and Ella de la Cruz grew close in the time they spent together from preschool to eighth grade. She said his favorite things to do were to play sports and make people laugh.
“He used to make fun of me because he thought that I was in love with him.” de la Cruz said. “It was a huge joke, but the entire ten years we went to school he would say, ‘No, you’re in love with me.’ He told my parents that too, he was such a clown, even with the parents, even as a little 8-year-old.”
De la Cruz and Bowne parted ways after eighth grade. She went to Seattle Preparatory, and he went to Kennedy High School 15 minutes away in Burien. She said though they lost touch in high school, they had reconnected within the last couple years.
“He told me that he was going to transfer to Western and he was really excited about it,” de la Cruz said.
While attending Kennedy High School, Chris excelled in English, wrestling and outdoor adventures.
“One of my favorite memories of him was when he and I and another friend of ours went canoeing on Lake Washington,” said close high school friend and University of Washington student Sonja Demco. “He and I would turn our paddles so the canoe would go in all directions, which really annoyed our other friend. We didn’t care. We spent the whole time laughing. We ended up beaching the canoe against our friend’s will and to this day we had considered that one of the best times of our lives.”
Demco and Chris met their freshman year at Kennedy High School. She said his smile was something she will never forget.
“We became more than just friends that would go out,” Demco said. “We would have long talks and he was always so intellectual. We talked about our goals in life. He had become someone I could really relate to.”
Demco said Chris had grown into someone she considered a best friend, and his death tremendously affected her whole family, who had gotten to know Chris well in the last years of his life.
“He was very willing to help out with my family,” Demco said. “He was like a mentor to my brother in so many ways. My brother was devastated and I felt terrible when I told him Chris had died. I shook and I couldn’t believe it at all. We had just talked days before it happened.”
Not long before the car accident Chris joined his family to celebrate his cousin’s wedding. It was over Labor Day weekend, and Chris had made plans to see his friends.
“He showed up and said, ‘I’m only staying 10 minutes, I’m only staying 10 minutes,’” his aunt Buening said. “He stayed the whole time.”
Upon graduating from Kennedy High School, Chris started taking English classes at Bellevue College. With his sights set on Western he completed his associate degree. After two years he was prepared to move out of his parent’s house and earn his bachelor’s degree in English.
But Chris was not new to the Bellingham area, his father said. They had been taking family vacations to their friend’s cabin at Sandy Point in Ferndale since Chris was 6 years old. David and Roberta Bowne said their memories of the time they spent with Chris on that beach are overwhelming.
Six years ago they purchased the beach house. Chris was living there for the school year, approximately 20 miles away from Western’s campus and seven miles away from Lake Terrell where the accident occurred.
“He was very proud of that fact that he was on his own,” David Bowne said. “As he would say it often ‘Dad it’s just turning another page in the book,’ because he and I would get teary eyed when we would say our goodbyes, but we got to say our goodbyes that week when school started. We came up north and we all had the opportunity to wish him well in school and ask him to make us proud and he responded with how much he loved us and that he would. So we had that moment with Chris before his life was tragically taken in the automobile accident.”
Chris was registered for three English classes this quarter and only two years away from achieving his bachelor’s degree and finding a teaching job.
“We saw him on Saturday and he told us how many people were in each class,” Roberta Bowne said. “One of the teachers had already given him an assignment that was due in ten weeks, and he already had three ideas he was working on.”
Roberta Bowne said this professor told Chris that out of all the project ideas ever presented to her for this assignment, two of Chris’s ideas were the best she had ever heard.
“He wanted to major in English so he could go back to high school and teach English and be a wrestling coach,” his father said. “That is the goal he told his grandmother. He was a son that made us very proud. If I were to write my words of what Chris meant to me it would be a book that I could not write. There aren’t enough pages to tell you what Chris meant to us.”
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