Female student

In Memory of Natalie Anne Dietrich: April 21, 1995 to January 30, 2016 By David J. Dietrich

The door of the hospital nursery created a draft over the round red face of newborn Natalie Anne Dietrich on April 21st, 1995. I observed it wrinkle up in reaction, and I wondered if this was one of her first sensations outside the womb, as today was the first day of her life in the outside world. “What will the future bring her?” I thought. Twenty years and nine months later, I gave that same beautiful face of a beautiful woman a final kiss before her cremation—she had died of a fatal synthetic drug ingestion while a junior at Montana State University. Her short life captured many traits: loyalty, friendship, humor, passion, love, and, yes, risk. To sum up her life is like trying to put the Yellowstone River into a thimble: it was undammed, free-flowing, and sometimes flowing over its banks. Between her sophomore and junior year at MSU, she found a volunteer program and flew by herself to Australia. She called me from Australia pleading with me to engage in “skydiving.” What was a father to do? As a youth, she would steal my latte at the soccer game and glare at you if you asked for it back, and then apologize in earnest later. She would count horses from her car seat in the back of our Ford Taurus as she traveled to Great Falls; she kept a precise count of all mares and colts on the way. She had a profound and deep love for horses, and penned the following poem as a sixth-grader: I Am By Natalie Dietrich I AM horse crazy and curious I WONDER why people are racist I HEAR the ocean waves hitting the soft sand I SEE the world fighting every day I WANT peace on Earth I AM horse crazy and curious I PRETEND I can fly over the mountains with my horse I FEEL faint when I see blood I TOUCH my parents with my flute I WORRY about my family dying I CRY when someone special to me leaves I AM horse crazy and curious I UNDERSTAND why people get hurt I SAY random stuff I DREAM of living until I'm 100 I TRY not to hurt people's feelings I HOPE to be a famous horse rider.

MSU allowed her to expand her mind. She enjoyed environmental studies and planned to major in economics. She had achieved a GPA in excess of 3.5 while a junior. She considered being a lawyer and saw her friends progress in their own careers and romances, wondering where her life would take her. One day, she took her cat Bridger on a leash on a walk in the Hyalite trail area near Bozeman with a smirk at her friend's camera at her achievement of walking a cat several miles. In summers, she would hunt with flashlights at night with sister Rachel for crawdads in a small lake near Big Fork, MT; Rachel was the spotter and Natalie the scooper. In the summer of 2015, she invited friends Alana, Hannah, and Chloe to her family cabin near Bigfork. They took a trip to Glacier National Park; they posed smiling on a guard rail on the Going-to-the-Sun Highway, its alpine horizon in the background, frozen in time on the upward arc of their lives. Three of the four are now married. One has two children. They have all given us life beyond Natalie’s passing. As a student, she gave me many MSU memorabilia, including a Bobcat drink coaster I still use with a smile. She loved seeing her Grizzly father in blue and gold at Homecoming and I lovingly obliged. I knew she was happy in a place whose motto is, “Mountains and Minds,” where she could cultivate life. In the twenty years between her birth on April 21st, 1995, from that brief draft caused by the nursery door to the shock of her sudden loss, she lived an outsized life. She now rides proudly on top of her jumping horse in midair in forward motion, arching upward over the final brick wall, smiling at all of us, feeling the onrush of warm air, blessing her horse.