President Russell M. Nelson, the pioneering heart surgeon whose second act as an apostle culminated in his 90s with leadership so vigorous and sweeping that his presidency forever transformed The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has died. He was 101.
“With sorrow we announce that Russell M. Nelson, beloved President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, passed away peacefully shortly after 10 p.m. MDT today at his home in Salt Lake City. He was 101 — the oldest president in the history of the Church," a church news release stated.
President Nelson’s beloved wife, Sister Wendy Nelson, was with him when he died. His counselors in the First Presidency, President Dallin H. Oaks and President Henry B. Eyring, visited him in his final days as did each of his living children and their spouses.
President Nelson’s more than seven years as the church’s 17th prophet-president were marked by the bridges he built, including a watershed collaboration with the NAACP, during a divisive era when other world leaders were unable or unwilling to work together.
He led the Church of Jesus Christ through the COVID-19 pandemic with hope and optimism, restructured its worship services and its ministering and launched it on a staggering course of temple-building that will continue for years beyond his death.
The church had six operating temples when he was born and 159 when he became president. He announced 200 more during his administration.
He was 93 at the beginning of his tenure, but set the rapid pace of a man who was an avid skier into his 10th decade. He galvanized the church during a dynamic first 100 days that included a general conference full of breathtaking announcements and a circumnavigation of the globe on a ministry tour with stops in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific.
He taught the gospel of Jesus Christ to his last days. On Sept. 5, he published an essay in Time Magazine days before his 101st birthday.
In it, he said his birthday wish was that people would follow Christ and revisited his teachings about the Second Great Commandment.
“Love your neighbor and treat them with compassion and respect,” President Nelson wrote. “A century of experience has taught me this with certainty: anger never persuades, hostility never heals and contention never leads to lasting solutions. Too much of today’s public discourse, especially online, fosters enmity instead of empathy.”
President Nelson’s connection with church members
Those first days of his presidency forged a deep and tender connection between President Nelson and church members around the world. They delighted in his age-defying vigor — he was born Sept. 9, 1924 — and his sense of humor. When he was 97, he cracked during a broadcast to young adults around the world that “at this point, I have stopped buying green bananas.”
He already had served as an apostle for 34 years, but church members quickly came to better know a prophet with the demeanor of gentleman from the past with an energetic vision for the future of the church and its members.
That vision was laser guided on encouraging them to follow Jesus Christ’s peacemaking example and to focus on accessing the everyday strengthening power he said Christ offered them through the covenants Latter-day Saints make in temples that bind them both to God and their families.
While speaking during general conference on April 7, 2024 — the 40th anniversary of the day the church sustained him to the apostleship in 1984 — he announced plans for 15 temples and called them “the gateway to the greatest blessings God has in store for each of us.”
“That is why we are doing all within our power, under the direction of the Lord, to make the temple blessings more accessible to members of the church,” he said.
In his 114th general conference talk in October 2024, he said, “Every sincere seeker of Jesus Christ will find him in the temple. You will feel his mercy. You will find answers to your most vexing questions. You will better comprehend the joy of his gospel.”
President Nelson’s ministry was truly international. He preached in more than 130 countries and dedicated 31 nations for the preaching of the gospel. He also more than doubled the church’s global humanitarian spending to more than $1.45 billion per year.
He was a family man, too. He and his late first wife of 59 years, Dantzel White Nelson, had 10 children, including nine daughters. After her death in 2005, he married Wendy Watson Nelson in 2006. He had 57 grandchildren and 168 great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild.
‘Contention is evil’
Blessed with the musical gift of perfect pitch, President Nelson taught and exemplified harmony, civility and unity in a discordant era beset by fractious social media discourse, nationalism and political division.
In contrast to that chaos, he became the inaugural laureate of the Gandhi-King-Mandela Peace Prize in April 2023. The honor came 11 days after he delivered a landmark talk on peacemaking at the 193rd Annual General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“Make no mistake about it: Contention is evil!” he said. He remained adamant that people could change the world one interaction at a time by modeling “how to manage honest differences of opinion with mutual respect and dignified dialogue.”
He declared contention pointless and harmful even as many government leaders, influencers and media personalities cultivated controversy to drive their ambitions.
“Contention reinforces the false notion that confrontation is the way to resolve differences; but it never is,” he said. “Contention is a choice. Peacemaking is a choice. You have your agency to choose contention or reconciliation. I urge you to choose to be a peacemaker, now and always.”
He spoke from an expanded perspective as a centenarian who led the Latter-day Saints at the bicentennial of what its canon describes as the beginning of the Restoration of Christ’s original church.
Changing the church
Among the many adjustments President Nelson spearheaded was a renewed emphasis on the proper name of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; he urged members and others not to use the term “Mormon” except in historical references, which led to the renaming of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
He also overhauled the church’s Sunday worship schedule, reducing the three-hour block to two hours; and introduced a home-centered, church-supported model of worship with new gospel study resources for home use.
While president, he became the oldest apostle and prophet in church history but hardly slowed. His son described him as “a cat on a hot tin roof” at the start of his administration. He regularly sat on the edge of his seat into his late 90s, posture perfect and a smile on his face. He appeared ready to spring to a pulpit or into action.
His colleagues in church leadership, who sat next to and worked with him for decades, said his backbone was ramrod straight, too, when it came to defending the church and its doctrines. Mostly, though, he invited listeners to improve their lives and outlooks by following Christ, regularly issuing international calls for gratitude, optimism and kindness.
The third person ever to perform a successful open-heart operation put down his scalpel upon his call to the apostleship and turned to healing hearts spiritually.
A legend in cardiothoracic surgery
Born in Salt Lake City and raised through the Depression, young Russell Nelson was a precocious learner who convinced his mother to let him ride a streetcar alone to the library so he could devour books. His high school a cappella choir director showed off his perfect pitch by calling on a member of an audience to hit a note on the piano. He identified each note.
A lifelong learner, Russell graduated from high school at 16, simultaneously earned bachelor and medical degrees at the University of Utah at 22, hired a tutor at age 54 to learn Mandarin Chinese when a prophet suggested it, and hired another tutor to learn enough Dutch to lead the Hosanna Shout at a temple dedication at age 63.
He married Dantzel White in 1945 and then set out with his young bride to seek a doctorate in medicine at the University of Minnesota, the hotbed of research into open-heart surgery. Operating on a live heart was listed as a medical sin in one of his textbooks.
President Nelson is right up there along with the biggest legends in cardiothoracic surgery.
— Dr. Craig Selzman
He proved to be a gifted researcher for Clarence Dennis, who built a team to develop an artificial heart-lung bypass machine. It was a difficult innovation. When the team finally managed to sustain dogs briefly, they later died of a mysterious ailment.
Once, Dennis left President Nelson in charge of the lab while he left on an extended trip overseas. When Dennis returned, his protege had identified the problem. The lab’s cleaning process wasn’t eliminating bacteria. President Nelson developed a purification process.
The discovery and solution became the basis of his thesis and of multiple articles in medical journals. As a researcher, he published more than 70 peer-reviewed papers.
The heart-lung bypass machine allowed doctors to stop a patient’s heart and repair it. Blood flowing into the right atrium was rerouted to the machine next to the operating table, where an oxygenator stripped out carbon dioxide and delivered oxygen to the blood. Then the heart-lung machine returned the blood to the aorta, which sent it coursing to the patient’s brain, fingers and toes.
Dennis and a colleague used the team’s machine to perform the first open-heart operation on a human being in 1951. The patient died, but the principles were used in the first successful operation in 1953.
In 1955, President Nelson became first to perform an open-heart operation west of the Mississippi. He used an oxygenator he designed to make Utah the third U.S. state to host successful open-heart surgery. Dantzel helped sew parts for the machine.
In 1960, President Nelson developed tricuspid valve annuloplasty, an advanced surgical solution for tricuspid valve regurgitation, at about the same time as a California surgeon who worked independently.
“President Nelson is right up there along with the biggest legends in cardiothoracic surgery,” said Dr. Craig Selzman, professor of surgery and the surgical director of the Cardiac Mechanical Support and Heart Transplant program at the University of Utah.
Over the next two decades, he balanced his surgical practice and teaching with family and church duties, serving as a Temple Square missionary, a stake president overseeing multiple congregations and as general president of the Sunday School, which gave him responsibility for Sunday School classes throughout the world.
President Nelson had performed 7,000 operations and was at the height of his prowess before his surgical career ended with the call to serve as an apostle on April 7, 1984.
“The year before he was called to be an apostle, he performed 360 open heart operations and his mortality rate was about 1%,” said his biographer, Elder Spencer J. Condie, an emeritus General Authority Seventy.
He helped train the next generation of surgeons as the University of Utah’s longest-acting director of the residency and fellowship training program for aspiring heart surgeons. He also traveled the world, training heart surgeons from Buenos Aires to Beijing.
President Nelson’s pledge to serve
President Nelson set the tone for his administration in a broadcast on Jan. 16, 2018, two days after he was set apart by other church leaders to succeed the late President Thomas S. Monson.
“I declare my devotion to God our Eternal Father, and to his Son, Jesus Christ,” President Nelson said. “I know them, love them and pledge to serve them — and you — with every remaining breath of my life.”
It wasn’t immediately clear outside church headquarters what form that would take until the annual general conference four months later. One leader described the electric conference as a rush of revelation.
President Nelson led off the conference by calling an Asian American and a Brazilian to the Quorum of the Twelve. Then he restructured priesthood quorums in every congregation and replaced the iconic home-teaching and visiting-teaching programs with a new concept of ministering. He concluded by drawing gasps of wonder when he announced seven new temples, including the first for India.
“President Nelson, I don’t know how many more rushes we can handle this weekend,” then-Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve joked. “Some of us have weak hearts. But as I think about it, you can take care of that, too. What a prophet.”
He was just getting started. Days later, he embarked on his first international ministry tour.
“The Lord’s message is for everyone,” he told the Deseret News during his first stop in London. “This is a global work. Whenever I’m comfortably situated in my home, I’m in the wrong place. I need to be where the people are. We need to bring them the message of the Savior.”
‘Eat your vitamin pills’
The next six months brought additional testimony and meaningful invitations. In the fall, at the end of another international ministry, he dedicated the Concepción Chile Temple and said much more lay ahead. In an interview, he leaned forward knowingly, smiled broadly and said, “If you think the church has been fully restored, you’re just seeing the beginning. There is much more to come.”
The smile grew a little bigger as he paused at the end of each of the next few sentences.
“Wait till next year,” he said. “And then the next year. Eat your vitamin pills. Get your rest. It’s going to be exciting.”
To those in senior church leadership, the tempo was clear immediately.
“President Nelson — strong in inspiration and courageous in tackling long-delayed and difficult issues,” President Dallin H. Oaks wrote in his journal after one of the first meetings of the new First Presidency in January 2018. The first counselor in the First Presidency added soon after, “In First Presidency meeting, we had an outpouring of revelation to all three of us. The Lord is in charge, and with his direction we can make big changes.”
Presidents Nelson and Oaks were called together to the apostleship in April 1984, but they had been friends dating back to the 1960s. Until President Nelson’s death, they sat next to each other in meetings of the Quorum of the Twelve and First Presidency for 40 straight years.
In February 2019, President Oaks said the first year had been a “remarkable period of President Nelson’s rapid and inspired decisions on important matters for future refinement and implementation/announcement. I feel privileged to be part of this.”
Seeing an unparalleled future for the church
President Nelson visited six continents in his first two years as the church’s president.
He convened the first gathering of the entire First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve outside the United States for the dedication of the Rome Italy Temple, which he called a hinge-point in church history.
“Things are going to move forward at an accelerated pace,” he said, later adding, “The church is going to have an unprecedented future, unparalleled; we’re just building up to what’s ahead now.”
At that time, he had announced 19 of the 200 temples he announced during his tenure.
“We need to purify our language, elevate our thoughts and live our lives with obedience to God’s commandments,” he said in 2019 in Quito, Ecuador. “Please teach your children about the Lord Jesus Christ. His Atonement is the most important event in the history of the world and is the foundation of our religion. All other things concerning our religions are secondary to it.”
The pandemic: Hope and optimism in Christ’s gospel
Months later, the church faced an international crisis as the COVID-19 pandemic threatened the lives of its global membership and challenged its ability to gather for worship, preach the gospel and operate its temples. President Nelson suspended worship services, oversaw the closure of the church’s universities and temples, and sequestered or sent home tens of thousands of missionaries across the world.
The pandemic halted world travel, so President Nelson instead used video to speak directly to people two days after the pandemic was declared in March 2020. He said church leaders were praying for the sick and those who had lost loved ones. He also advised that the gospel of Jesus Christ “provides certain hope and help to a troubled world.”
“I love you, I pray for you and I promise that you will receive comfort and peace as you continue to hear him,” he said, adding “These unique challenges will pass in time. I remain optimistic for the future.”
Just before Thanksgiving that first year of the pandemic, he again released a video, prescribing gratitude and prayer as a healing remedy for spiritual and societal problems.
“I view the current pandemic as only one of many ills that plague our world, including hate, civil unrest, racism, violence, dishonesty and lack of civility,” President Nelson said.
He invited people “to turn social media into your own personal gratitude journal. Post every day about what you are grateful for, whom you are grateful for and why you are grateful. At the end of seven days, see if you feel happier and more at peace. Use the hashtag #GiveThanks. Working together, we can flood social media with a wave of gratitude that reaches the four corners of the earth.”
He urged church members to be vaccinated and received the shot himself.
As the church emerged from the pandemic, President Nelson led it with similar vigor as before.
‘Let God prevail’
In landmark general conference talks, President Nelson taught about revelation, reorganized the faith’s home teaching program into ministering, and asked people to recognize how they personally hear God.
He also asked them to embrace regular repentance as a joyful choice to do better and be better: “When we choose to repent, we choose to become more like Jesus Christ,” he said.
One of his most ringing statements was encouraging people to let God prevail in their lives.
“The question for each of us, regardless of race, is the same,” he said. “Are you willing to let God prevail in your life? Are you willing to let God be the most important influence in your life? Will you allow his words, his commandments and his covenants to influence what you do each day? Will you allow his voice to take priority over any other? Are you willing to let whatever he needs you to do take precedence over every other ambition? Are you willing to have your will swallowed up in his?”
Another was his optimistic call to church members to sharpen their ability to receive revelation as a bulwark against a spiritually suffocating world.
“My beloved brothers and sisters, I plead with you to increase your spiritual capacity to receive revelation,” he said. “Let this Easter Sunday be a defining moment in your life. Choose to do the spiritual work required to enjoy the gift of the Holy Ghost and hear the voice of the Spirit more frequently and more clearly.”
In addition to his emphasis on the proper name of the church, President Nelson put his stamp on Latter-day Saint language in other ways, including frequent usage of the term covenant path that soon was reflected in the language of other church leaders.
Elder Ronald A. Rasband surveyed the church leader’s then-six years as president at the April 2024 general conference and noted that, “President Nelson has a way with words.”
Elder Rasband listed some of President Nelson’s sayings: “Keep on the covenant path,” “Gather Israel,” “Let God prevail,” “Build bridges of understanding,” “Give thanks,” “Increase faith in Jesus Christ,” “Take charge of your testimony,” “Become a peacemaker” and “Think celestial.”
Bridges instead of walls
Presiding over the church in an era of division, President Nelson repeatedly and firmly taught its members to become leaders in abandoning racism and instead embrace building bridges of understanding.
As church president, he took to pulpits at general conference and at a national NAACP convention to make pleas for unity.
“Brothers and sisters, please listen carefully to what I am about to say,” he said at the October 2020 general conference. “God does not love one race more than another. His doctrine on this matter is clear. He invites all to come unto him, ‘black and white, bond and free, male and female.’ I assure you that your standing before God is not determined by the color of your skin. Favor or disfavor with God is dependent upon your devotion to God and his commandments, and not the color of your skin.
“I grieve that our Black brothers and sisters the world over are enduring the pains of racism and prejudice. Today, I call upon our members everywhere to lead out in abandoning attitudes and actions of prejudice. I plead with you to promote respect for all of God’s children.”
By that time, he already had linked arms with the NAACP. In May 2018, he and NAACP President Derrick Johnson jointly called for racial harmony and an end to prejudice.
The following year, President Nelson strode across the concrete floor of the Cobo Center in Detroit at the NAACP national convention and spoke for the church about race, saying he wanted the church and NAACP members to become dear friends.
“Simply stated, we strive to build bridges of cooperation rather than walls of segregation,” he said.
The origin of a phrase and philosophy
It was a phrase he used around the world — at the Vatican after a meeting with Pope Francis, in Tonga and elsewhere. He told the Deseret News that he began to develop the phrase while he was an apostle on a five-year diplomatic assignment to gain access for the church to operate in the Soviet Bloc. His efforts secured official church recognition in more than a dozen countries.
“The Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain and all those things, they’re limiting. The Gospel of Jesus Christ liberates people from labels that would otherwise limit and restrict the capacity for continuing progress,” he said.
Another memorable teaching has been his repeated plea with people to understand that God knows them individually and loves them completely.
“In all of eternity, no one will ever know you or care about you more than he does,” he said in a broadcast to young adults. “No one will ever be closer to you than he is. You can pour out your heart to him and trust him to send the Holy Ghost and angels to care for you.”
That love comes because of each person’s true identity, he said.
“I believe that if the Lord were speaking to you directly tonight,” President Nelson said, “the first thing he would make sure you understand is your true identity. My dear friends, you are literally spirit children of God.”
Temples and hope
He also was a man of sorrows.
He was watching a basketball game on television with his wife Dantzel when the heart of his sweetheart of 59 years suddenly stopped beating. If they had been at the hospital, he could have operated but at home, “All my knowledge as a heart surgeon could not save her,” he said.
Cancer claimed the lives of two of their daughters.
“I understand the heartbreak of separation from loved ones,” he said. “But Jesus is the Light that shines in the dark. He is ‘the way, the truth and the life,’ He is our anchor when we are desperately in need.”
He taught tirelessly that families can be reunited in eternity by being sealed in Latter-day Saint temples and keeping temple covenants, or promises, with God.
“Everything we believe and every promise God has made to his covenant people come together in the temple,” he said.
“I promise that increased time in the temple will bless your life in ways nothing else can,” he added.
He taught memorably about the ongoing renovation of the Salt Lake Temple, which he announced in 2019.
“We are sparing no effort to give this venerable temple, which had become increasingly vulnerable, a foundation that will withstand the forces of nature into the Millennium,” President Nelson said. “In like manner, it is now time that we each implement extraordinary measures — perhaps measures we have never taken before — to strengthen our personal spiritual foundations.”
He said the temple will be the safest place in the Salt Lake Valley when the work is done, similar to the ways the temple binds Latter-day Saints securely to Christ.
“Likewise, whenever any kind of upheaval occurs in your life, the safest place to be spiritually is living inside your temple covenants.”
During his administration, the church revised the language and procedures of temple ceremonies and refined the temple recommend questions.
The First Presidency announced updated temple ordinances at the end of a year in which one of President Nelson’s signature phrases was about “gathering Israel on both sides of the veil.”
He also made it possible for women to be eligible to serve as witnesses for baptisms in and out of the temple and for temple sealings.
‘Extremely high risk’
President Nelson’s first act was as a groundbreaking open-heart surgeon raising 10 children while consistently following the advice and counsel of church presidents. In fact, he had met 10 of the 16 prophet/presidents who preceded him.
During his career, the University of Chicago in 1965 offered President Nelson an extraordinary package to leave his practice in Salt Lake City. He would get a raise, a research lab and staff support. Chicago also offered to pay the entire tuition for all of his then nine children to attend the universities of their choice.
Though dazzled by the offer, he sought the counsel of church President David O. McKay, who advised him not to take his nine daughters to Chicago.
“Our faith was very secure,” he wrote in his autobiography. “We had been privileged to have a prophetic pronouncement, and we were going to be totally obedient.”
That decision made it possible for President Nelson to operate seven years later on the heart of one of his prophet-predecessors, President Spencer W. Kimball. It was an extraordinarily dangerous procedure that would require more pioneering by President Nelson. He would have to replace his patient’s defective aortic valve with a prosthetic. Then he would attempt a coronary artery bypass graft.
During a meeting with church President Harold B. Lee and President Kimball, who then was the president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the surgeon said the operation would “entail extremely high risk.” Nobody had ever tried to stop a 77-year-old man’s heart and repair two separate problems before, he said.
President Kimball wearily announced he was ready to die. President Lee rose to his feet and pounded his fist on the table.
“Spencer, you are called! You are not to die!” President Lee said. “You are to do everything that you need to do in order to care for yourself and continue to live.”
President Kimball immediately agreed with the man he revered as a prophet, the same way President Nelson had when he considered the move to Chicago. Those two moments described each man’s loyalty to Jesus Christ and their love for their church and its leaders, a church they both would lead.
President Kimball survived the operation. When President Lee died unexpectedly 20 months later, President Kimball became the church’s 12th president during a vital era of growth and revelation.
Eleven years later, the former patient called his doctor to be an apostle. Another 34 years after that, President Kimball’s surgeon became the church’s 17th president.
“(President Kimball’s) momentous decision, which shaped the history of the church, was not based on medical recommendation,” President Nelson would say. “It was based strictly on the desire of an apostle of the Lord to be obedient to the counsel of his file leaders in the church. It was based on the inspired direction of the First Presidency of the church in answer to his request.”
“Who, in seeking the counsel of the brethren, has put their money where their mouth is about who is a prophet?” President Holland said. “If we ask for their opinion, are we willing to take it? That’s a magnificent quality in my mind.”
A calm, precise man
President Nelson exhibited calm and precision throughout his adult life. Each trait came to define him.
Some surgeons blasted music, threw instruments and cussed throughout operations. Once, while President Nelson was a student assisting a surgeon amputating a gangrenous leg, the surgeon erupted in anger and threw a scalpel loaded with botulism. The scalpel landed in President Nelson’s forearm. He did not get sick but vowed he would never throw anything in anger, “whether it be scalpels or words.”
He played classical music during operations.
“The interesting thing about Russell Nelson’s operations, which many of us try to duplicate, is that they are very quiet and controlled,” said John Doty, a thoracic and cardiac surgeon at Intermountain Healthcare in Murray and the son of his former partner. “Just quiet, calm, controlled, organized and methodical.
In May 2009, armed gunmen invaded the Latter-day Saint mission home in Maputo, Mozambique, where President and Sister Nelson were eating taco salads with the area president, the mission president, their wives and another couple.
The assailants intended to harm President Nelson and take Sister Nelson hostage, she later said. They broke the arm of the mission president’s wife. However, Sister Nelson said she felt peace. President Nelson was unflappable. They sustained superficial injuries and the gunmen fled.
He was a precise man. He weighed himself daily, and if he gained a pound or two, he walked it off. As the church’s prophet, he kept a lined yellow pad of paper beside his bed to record inspiration. During his first month as president, Sister Wendy Nelson was prompted to leave their bedroom. Two hours later he emerged from the room with the pad of paper.
“Wendy, you won’t believe what’s been happening,” he said to his wife. “The Lord has given me detailed instruction on what I am to do.’”
