Thomas Smith Kimball

Sources

1. Suicide, complicated grief and the hidden darkness of the heart, Religion News Service, October 15, 2020.

• 1. Suicide, complicated grief and the hidden darkness of the heart

  • 15 Oct 2020
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  • Religion News Service

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  [excerpt]

  (RNS) — Tom Kimball, a fixture in the Mormon Studies community, took his life yesterday.

  I’m speechless, essentially. And it feels like a triple shock: There’s the sudden death, and the fact that it was a suicide, and the additional bombshell that apparently Tom has been accused of abuse.

  What?

  I had utterly no idea, and as I read the allegations that are now surfacing I’m experiencing a complex series of emotions I can barely begin to process.

  Here’s what I do know. Tom was very involved in the Mormon Studies world, first as a bookseller for Deseret stores and then as a publishing professional with Signature Books in Salt Lake City.

  It was during his Signature years that we became friends. I was working as an editor at Publishers Weekly, and Tom was my marketing contact at the press. We bonded over books and our shared love of history, and I ran into him regularly through the years at conferences like the Mormon History Association and Sunstone, long after we’d both moved on to other jobs.

  Tom went through a very rough patch at one point, and I didn’t know much about the details. A faith crisis, a divorce, a career change. He landed here in Ohio a few years ago, working as a tour guide at the Kirtland Temple and going back to school. In 2017 he gave me a once-in-a-lifetime tour of the temple, which he called “Grandmother.”

  [...]

  By that point Tom had left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and become cautiously interested in the Community of Christ (the former Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints). Tom saw these two groups as cousins with a shared mission: to take care of Grandmother.

  [...]

  Tom was not the person I thought he was, or at least he was not only that person; alongside the flamboyant history lover was a shadowy individual I never saw.

  Now I am doubting and castigating myself because of it: How could I have not been aware of the terrible pain he had caused to other people, including, apparently, his own kids?