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As the Deseret News reporter covering The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I have met and known many apostles and written about their lives and deaths and funerals. But the death of President Jeffrey R. Holland on Saturday was personal because of his ministry to my own father at his death 31 years ago.
After my Latter-day Saint mission to Germany, my family moved to Utah — four doors down (and a different ward) from President and Sister Holland.
In June 1994, President Holland was ordained an apostle. I was a 27-year-old father of two then, and my own father, Willard Bean Walch, was dying of colon cancer.
It was a shock none of us had accepted.
He and we believed God could and would heal him. But in December of 1994, new tests showed that despite treatment, Dad’s cancer was spreading again. He began to suffer badly, but fought to do his part in God’s healing process.
We later learned that neighbors took the news to Elder Holland. On that Christmas Sunday, while my wife and I were at home and church in east Provo with our two small children, Elder and Sister Holland knocked on the door to my parents’ home with a fruit basket. The youngest of my six sisters were opening presents around my father’s hospital bed with him and my mother.
The Hollands spent an hour of their Christmas with a Walch family in crisis.
Elder Holland gave my father a blessing. He referenced Doctrine & Covenants 42:48:
“And again, it shall come to pass that he that hath faith in me to be healed, and is not appointed unto death, shall be healed.”
He said that if our father could have been healed by faith, his faith and the faith in our family would have healed him.
Let me stop for a moment to describe my father. He was a fun, vigorous, loving man like President Holland who loved the gospel so much he shared it wherever he could. Living in the days before cellphones, he always kept copies of the Book of Mormon in his glove compartment and stopped on highways all over America to help stranded motorists. He once loaned a car to a stranded family so they could meet their needs, trusting the family would return it. All he ever asked in return was that they read the Book of Mormon or let the Mormon missionaries in if they ever knocked on their door.
President Holland’s blessing turned the focus of my father’s deep, abiding love and faith in the gospel and Atonement of Jesus Christ from God’s healing power on earth to his eternal Plan of Happiness. My father told my mother he only wanted to stay here if he could serve here. If not, he would serve on the other side of the veil. It soon became clear he had accepted he would not recover.
Elder Holland returned to bless Dad again when my wife and I were present. That’s when we first met him. He blessed Dad that he could choose when he would depart. Five dear and special days later, Dad went Home.
What I didn’t know then — what I couldn’t have known then, because President Holland had not yet publicly shared it — was that 18 years earlier on a Christmas Eve, President Holland had the same experience we were having. His own father had a heart attack and lay in the hospital on the holiday.
I didn’t hear the story until December 2018, when I went to Oxford, England, to cover President Holland’s visit to the British Parliament. He also spoke at a Christmas service in a beautiful little Anglican chapel and shared the story of rushing to his father’s bedside.
“By the time we finally got to see him, wired and tubed and gray and unconscious, it was mid-afternoon on Dec. 24, Christmas Eve,” Elder Holland said. “‘Magnificent timing,’ I muttered to no one in particular.”
Christmas Eve turned into Christmas morning as he paced and prayed, alone in an unfamiliar hospital, feeling sorry for himself and mumbling questions about why he had to lose his dad at Christmas. Then he received what he termed a “theological wake-up call.”
“At 3 a.m., late-early morning in a very quiet hospital,” he said, “immersed as I was in some sorrow and self-pity, heaven sent me a small personal prepackaged revelation, a tiny Christmas declaration. In the midst of my mumbling about the very poor calendaring in all of this, I heard the clear, unbroken cry of a baby.”
The divine grace of the timing of that birth changed his outlook. He recognized the joy the new child must be in its parents’ lives. He remembered that his own mother always reminded him of the joy he brought her as a Christmas baby himself.
“With new eyes then, that morning, I went back to look at my dad, the great gift-giver who was starting to make his way out of the world on Christmas Day. He was doing so on the wings of the greatest gift ever given — the Atonement and Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. I thought of another Father who gave that gift.”
This past week, I couldn’t shake the feeling of three Christmases.
That Christmas in 1976 when the Spirit taught a younger Elder Holland at his father’s hospital bedside.
The Christmas in 1994 when he ministered with this background and his apostleship at my father’s deathbed.
And this very Christmas in 2025 when the Holland family gathered around his own deathbed and loved him on behalf of the entire church.
The bookend to this story is that a couple of weeks after my father died, President and Sister Holland visited my mother again so he could give a blessing to an overwhelmed widow.
“Brothers and sisters,” he later taught about ministering, “we have a heaven-sent opportunity as an entire church to demonstrate ‘pure religion … undefiled before God’ — ‘to bear one another’s burdens, that they may be light’ and to ‘comfort those that stand in need of comfort,’ to minister to the widows and the fatherless, the married and the single, the strong and the distraught, the downtrodden and the robust, the happy and the sad — in short, all of us, every one of us, because we all need to feel the warm hand of friendship and hear the firm declaration of faith.”
President Holland loved my family the way both the Father and Son love us. In his personal and personable ministry, he embodied for my family the natures of Jesus Christ and Heavenly Father.
I called my mother Saturday morning to tell her President Holland had died. We talked for half an hour about the way President Holland ministered to her, my father and my family.
When we were done, she made a short statement that was a better tribute than the long obit I had personally written and rewritten for the Deseret News about President Holland. Her summary showed how his ministering to us had reflected the true love of God the Father and Jesus Christ.
She said simply, “He was so sweet and tender with us.”
My Recent Stories
‘Weeping’: Anglican priest shares his emotional reaction to the loss of President Jeffrey R. Holland (Dec. 29)
President Oaks, civic leaders pay tribute to President Jeffrey R. Holland (Dec. 27)
President Jeffrey R. Holland hospitalized on Christmas Eve (Dec. 24)
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