In February, Utah Valley University President Astrid Tuminez’s husband collapsed and died on a South American peak. Her anguish was felt by many of the school’s 46,000 students.
Last month, just outside the window to her campus office, Charlie Kirk was graphically assassinated. A fresh layer of sorrow accompanies her feverish efforts to restore her students’ sense of security.
“They are two very different griefs but happening in the same year,” she told the Deseret News.
No wonder Tuminez identifies with Christ’s disciples pitched about in a boat on storm-tossed waters.
“With Charlie Kirk, with my personal grief I have really thought a lot about being on the sea when the fear was so intense, and his closest friends thought he’d abandoned them, when you feel stripped of all your safety, all your delusions of grandeur, all your delusions that your life’s so good,” she said.
“I’ve been reflecting on this one, because at a personal level, I feel I’m in this boat. The storms are buffeting this boat, and the rudder isn’t working. The sail isn’t working. The winds are too strong, and this water is going to be death for me and I have had to wait for God to hold me up.”
The combined hurt, shock and grief surprised her.
“I didn’t realize how traumatized I was until I started to prepare a statement for the students,” she said.
Her response to the first grief, the death of her husband, Jeffrey Tolk, was a long sabbatical full of inspiring attempts to address her desolation. Tolk, an avid hiker, suffered a pulmonary embolism climbing Mount Cotopaxi in Ecuador, part of the exercise plan to combat the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.
Tuminez attacks her second grief with all the energy her small body and gifted mind can muster. She wants UVU programs to provide students with new skills to match the unsettling problems roiling their young lives.
“I’ve said to students after Charlie Kirk’s killing, ‘Embrace your hurt, your shock, your grief,’” she said. “That’s exactly the same thing I did for myself.”
Kirk was speaking to thousands of students on a grassy area between UVU buildings when a sniper fired a single shot from a nearby campus rooftop, killing him and sending students running in panic.
“It was a very, very dark, difficult period, something I had never experienced before. I think grief like that, it takes a long time to metabolize. It takes a long time to alchemize.”
In some ways, her impoverished upbringing in the Philippines built her to handle this moment. So do her eclectic interests and education.
Tuminez is too real to pretend she has all the answers or that she’s pushed through all the mourning and is happy now.
But her year of desolation has provided her with hard-won insights into despair that may help others. And network news reporters have suggested that Utah Valley University may be onto something with its approach in the aftermath of the Kirk shooting.
“I would simply say to everybody, grief transforms you,” Tuminez said. “It will alchemize your life. To become human is to go through grief like that, that shatters you. In the shattering, you’re going to put yourself back together again.”
How Astrid Tuminez grieved for her soulmate
Her childhood was a cascade of crises.
Tuminez was born in a farming village but raised in a hut on stilts in the slums of Iloilo (EE-low EE-low) City. Violence, danger and deadly illness stalked her family. She saw her first murder victim — a man shot in the head — at age 10.
None of that prepared her for the loss of her husband, a man dubbed “The Incredible Tolk,” a poet who thoughtfully gave up Wall Street riches for work he found more meaningful.
They really were soulmates. She eulogized him as a husband who felt amplified, not diminished, by his wife’s work, talents and accomplishments.
Tuminez understandably reeled at his death, leaving UVU midsemester for a two-month sabbatical. She walked as many as 12 hours a day into Provo Canyon. She picked up pebbles, prayed all of her pain and incomprehension onto them and threw them in the Provo River.
“You’re bigger than me,” she told the river. “You can carry all of this for me.”
She also went to France, where she revisited Rocamadour, a pilgrimage site built into a cliff. A member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who was raised Catholic and studies Buddhism, she visited the stations of the cross.
“I just started weeping at the sculpture of Christ’s body, broken and limp, being handed to his sorrowing mother,” she said.
Embrace sorrow as a natural experience that connects us
In Paris alone for her wedding anniversary, she walked for 12 hours a day, stopping and praying in every old cathedral, lighting countless candles. She thought of the history of human petitions made in the centuries-old churches.
“How many knees have knelt on those stones, in those pews?” she said. “I felt connected to eons of humanity, eons of suffering, eons of supplication, eons of faith, and I found it very comforting.”
Tuminez ministered to her children on nature walks in France’s Dordogne Valley. The mother of three felt again that grief is not meant to be experienced in isolation.
“We’re part of a long thread of humanity joined in sorrow,” she said.
Her advice is to embrace the pain. She tells UVU students to feel their hurt, their shock, their grief.
“Cradle it like you would cradle a baby,” she tells them. “It’s very real. Hold it. Don’t repress it, don’t deny it. Then really lean on one another, that human connection.”
God is part of that thread, too.
“My divine nature is entwined with God’s divine nature,” she said. “God knows you, and God holds you. You are known and you are loved.”
What she wants to say to everyone in deep grief is that you are OK.
“All of the groping in the dark is just part of our human experience and our divine experience,” she said. “I think it is sacred, and I use that word sacred very sparingly. It’s a sacred experience. Hopefully we all come out of it having been alchemized into gold, into better humans with bigger hearts and greater courage to live fully.”
‘What shall we do tomorrow?’
That chaotic Filipino childhood also prepared Tuminez for practical leadership in a grave American crisis. She learned to solve problems and to help not only herself but others.
Her family’s hut was often battered by tropical storms. One particular typhoon roared around them in the darkness.
“If we survive this typhoon tonight,” she remembers thinking, “what shall we do tomorrow?”
When Kirk was killed, Tuminez was on her way to Rome, Italy. Her phone blew up with messages as her plane landed in Atlanta. She felt shock, bewilderment and unbelievable sadness, she said. She also would come to feel an obvious connection to another new widow, Erika Kirk.
Tuminez immediately flew back into the storm engulfing UVU, where Kirk’s killer was still at large and the campus community was in shock. She launched herself into formulating an operational and practical response for UVU.
“We’ve just been really focused on rebuilding, recreating safe space,” she said.
The plans have hard and soft components.
First, the school is beefing up its security, which was criticized as too lax. The university has hired a third-party organization to provide an independent review centered on improvement.
Two dozen “caring stations” met students when classes resumed Sept. 17, a week after the assassination. Volunteers handed out candy, provided information on how to find counseling and loaned stuffed animals to those who needed extra comfort for the day.
Students hugged and petted support animals brought in by UVU, including two alpacas, Macaroni and Cheese.
The university also hosted a Vigil for Unity. Tuminez is proud of that night and UVU’s student body president, Kyle Cullimore, who, during his closing remarks, said that when you’re running for your life, all of the division in the country that seems so big becomes very small.
Tuminez’s predecessor, Elder Matthew S. Holland, a General Authority Seventy of the Church of Jesus Christ, said at the vigil that UVU is built to be an answer to division and violence.
“It’s natural and fitting for UVU to ask: ‘Can we possibly heal? Can peace and agreement ever be found?’” Elder Holland said. “I’m only one voice, but the answer for me is, ‘Yes.’”
CNN reporter Nick Watt was on campus for the vigil. He told viewers the themes were unity, mourning and love — and he sounded impressed.
“Maybe the people of Utah,” he said, in a sentiment shared by other reporters on their networks, “maybe this vigil has some lessons for the rest of us."
‘What is the moment asking of us?’ Giving students practical skills
Tuminez has even bigger plans.
“What is the moment asking of us?” she said. “Where do we go from here? How do we find our better selves when our natural instinct is to lash out and to be enraged against whoever we want to blame?”
She has written a proposal for the university called, “Our Better Selves for a Better America.” It would connect UVU students to larger initiatives on campus and bind UVU to state and national efforts to reduce division, like the Heravi Peace Institute at Utah State University and Braver Angels.
She has consulted with the Carnegie Corporation of New York and Utah’s Disagree Better Institute.
Her plan has three pillars:
- The first is to offer academic certificates in mediation and negotiation.
- The second is to intensify and scale conferences, debates and groups already in place on campus, like the Herbert Institute for Public Policy and the Center for Constitutional Studies.
- Third, she wants to help students build skills in dialogue, empathetic listening and more.
“These are skills that help in your marriage,” she said, “in your job, in your leadership journey, in your disagreements with neighbors, in your functioning as a citizen of a democratic country where we are free to express ourselves and disagree vehemently without being contemptuous of one another.”
The skills are meant to match the moment.
“In a time of grief, in a time of shock, in a time of rage, can we offer human connection?” she asked. “Can we offer care? Can we offer a listening ear? Can we offer courage? Can we offer a rational conversation?
A university in the business of hope
In the Philippines, when Catholic nuns found Tuminez’s family in the slums, she was about 6 and couldn’t read or do math. She learned new ways to approach the world.
UVU offers students the same opportunity, she said. It is in the business of hope, she added, because of its state-mandated open-enrollment policy.
“We admit everybody here,” Tuminez said. “We don’t write off anyone. We always say whatever age, however your high school experience was, whether you took the SAT or not, it doesn’t matter. This is a place for you. We believe in you. We believe in your human potential.”
That mission is even more inspiring after Sept. 10, she said.
One of her favorite scriptures is 2 Timothy 1:7, “For God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.”
“If fear is driving our politics, if it’s driving our human relations, it’s disaster,” she said.
Fear is the opposite of love, and so is power that is about stillness, certainty, grace and love, she said.
Tuminez is still in a boat on choppy waters. She lights up like Christmas as students walk past and tell her she looks nice. She returns the compliment. She laughs with a student who photobombs her photo shoot.
The hurt remains etched around her bright brown eyes.
“You have to wait for God to hold you,” she said, “for what a friend of mine calls the living water to hold you up, because at that point that water transforms you.”
The living water held up the disciples, she said.
“It held them up, and then peace came. So that’s the story I’ve been thinking about.”