Sarah Anne Harmsworth

MISSOULA ~ Sarah Anne Harmsworth, 31, passed away on Friday, August 22nd, 2025, at her home in Missoula, Montana of alcoholism-related illness. She was born on January 13,1994 in Farmington, Utah, but moved with her parents to their property in the wilderness of northwest Montana later that year. Possibly because of those early years in the wilderness, she retained a deep affinity for nature throughout life. She attended primary schools in Los Alamos and Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Round Rock, Texas, then middle school in Corvallis, Montana, and graduated from Hellgate High School in Missoula in 2012. She played girl’s tennis at Hellgate, twice going to State and was an intense competitor. At age 13, she applied that sense of competition to her love of words and won the 2007 Montana State Spelling Bee, reaching the fifth round at the National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C.

But her main focus was always music; she began violin lessons at age five and quickly showed remarkable ability (if not at first, great enthusiasm). She majored in violin performance at Oberlin College and graduated with a BA from the University of Montana in 2017, after which she pursued a graduate degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music. She was a member of the Akron and Canton, Ohio Symphonies and spent summers studying and performing in Europe. Her violin teachers included Margaret Baldridge, Milan Vitek, William Preucil, and Daniel Lewis. After finishing her graduate work, she returned home to Missoula and played professionally with most of the orchestras in Montana, serving as Principal Second Violin with the Missoula Symphony as well as Associate Concertmaster with the Helena Symphony.

Sarah grew up helping cook in soup kitchens and socializing cats and dogs in animal shelters. During the last few years of her life her big heart would sometimes compel her to make and distribute sandwiches to unhoused humans who walked by her apartment. She was especially in love with dogs and throughout her life she would stop to try to pet them no matter how vicious or dirty they appeared. But she especially loved her border collie, Aurora, who preceded her in death this year, perhaps to serve as Sarah’s guide and companion in the afterlife.

She struggled with depression, social-anxiety and anorexia from the time of her middle school years when she was the target of bullying that was apparently unleashed in response to some of her neuroatypical traits. Soon afterwards, she found that alcohol helped her to cope. While she could never abide anyone who made assumptions about who she was or anyone who attempted to offer advice with a cookie-cutter approach to her problems, she became a vocal advocate for the destigmatization of mental illness.

She was a complex, unique, gifted, beautiful human being who was so much more than what her problems made her appear to be. When you remember her, please make her memory a blessing in whatever way you feel would be of service. If her memory helps us to propagate more love and kindness in the world, she will be most pleased.

Survivors include her parents, Don and Wendy Harmsworth, her brother David Harmsworth, grandparents Sherry and Terry Phillips, grandfather John Hopson, as well as numerous uncles, aunts, cousins and friends who were all part of her extended family. She is also deeply mourned by her loving partner and best friend Aaron Nooney, with whom she spent the last three years of her life.