I knew that when I got Connie Bye to join my magazine team as a contributing editor, that everything was going to be all right.
Our family met Connie and her husband, Dale, through a dear friend, their daughter Alicia. At the time, I was editor of Bainbridge Island magazine, and Alicia suggested I reach out to Connie about writing for us.
Her first article was on the Blakely Cemetery, and she and I met there to walk among the headstones. Connie stopped at the grave of a child to read the epitaph, a stanza from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. She cried. I knew immediately she was my person.
Her article was brilliant, and I didn’t change a single word. That never happens, but she really is that good. Many stories and years later when I was starting PNW Bainbridge, I asked her to come on the staff. She said, yes. Over the past four years she’s not only helped create the issues’ lineups, written some of the toughest stories and cheerfully edited hundreds of pieces, she’s been a solid business adviser, fierce defender and the dearest of friends.
But right now, her son’s family in Bellingham needs her more, so she and Dale have departed Bainbridge and headed north to start their next chapter where she can be most impactful in their lives. It makes me love her even more.
She will be missed beyond words. And though Connie won’t be able to work with us in exactly the same way as currently, she’s far from being rid of us.
Thank you, Connie. For everything.
