Celestina “Tina” Okonkwo, 72, of Belgrade, died peacefully at home on August 3, 2026. She was born March 12, 1954, in Enugu, Nigeria, and arrived in the Gallatin Valley in 1989 with a nursing degree and two suitcases. She worked thirty-two years at the Bozeman Deaconess emergency room, back when the hospital still smelled like wax floors and cigarette smoke.

She bought her house on Broadway Street in 1992 for what everyone now agrees was a reasonable sum, though the number makes younger nurses wince. Tina watched the hay fields across the road turn into the big-box corridor, and she watched the rent on her daughter’s apartment climb past her old mortgage payment. She never complained about the growth. She just kept a garden of collards and bitter leaf behind the garage, and she fed whoever showed up hungry.

Tina is survived by her daughter, Amara of Bozeman, and her brother, Chidi of Livingston. She was preceded in death by her husband, Samuel, in 2019, and by the original Dairy Queen on Seventh, which she maintained made the best peach shake in the valley.

Her coworkers remember her as the only person who could calm a screaming toddler and a combative drunk in the same shift, usually by offering both a graham cracker. She kept a spare set of scrubs in her locker for anyone who forgot theirs, a habit that outlasted three hospital administrators.

Services will be held at Dahl Funeral Home in Belgrade on Saturday at 11 a.m.