‘She cried with women all over the world’ — Farm girl who became LDS Church’s top female leader dies

At 7:45 a.m. on the Monday after the 2002 Winter Olympics had ended in an explosion of fireworks, an exhausted Bonnie and Jim Parkin were asleep in their Salt Lake City home when the phone rang.

It was the secretary to President Gordon B. Hinckley, who presided over The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, asking them to come in for an interview.

Within a few hours, the couple sat in Hinckley’s office, where the 91-year-old religious leader asked the surprised wife to take the helm of the Relief Society, the women’s organization of the global faith.

With her acceptance, Parkin — who died Monday, days before her 85th birthday — gave up the life of a physician’s wife, whose days were filled with gardening and grandchildren, tennis and lunches, cleaning and canning, to become a kind of jet-setting global CEO without pay.

As the Relief Society’s 14th general president from 2002 to 2007, she became the church’s most powerful woman at the time.

Her assignment: Create a “global sisterhood” among Latter-day Saint women in every culture and circumstance — a tall task, especially for a woman who had lived the bulk of her life in the Salt Lake Valley.

Still, Parkin told The Salt Lake Tribune in 2002, she believed her experiences were universal enough to connect with believing women everywhere.

After all, she said, she had been single, in the workforce, had children and then grandchildren. She had seen the terrible 2s and troubled teens. She nursed a mother after a stroke and a father with cancer. She sent sons on missions to foreign lands and welcomed daughters-in-law into her embrace. She has known farm life and school life and city life and non-American life. She had seen close-up the effects of alcohol, disbelief, illness and disappointment.

Also, Parkin had, she said, tasted repentance and forgiveness.

What would weave the countless strands of Latter-day Saint women together is not culture or circumstance, she said, but their common devotion to Jesus Christ.

A ‘believing and obedient heart’

Her faith and devotion ran deep, son Jeff Parkin said Tuesday. “She believed in praying and that God would answer your prayers, which happened constantly for her.”

His mother “had a believing and obedient heart, but she didn’t pretend to have it all figured out,” said Jeff, who teaches theater and media arts at church-owned Brigham Young University. “She balanced faith and thoughtfulness.”

At the same time, he said, she was always real.

“Mom didn’t believe in putting on the facade of a picture-perfect leader,” the son said. “She didn’t think that would help the women of the church.”

Not long after she became Relief Society president, the anxious mother called her son to say that Hinckley had asked her to speak at the church’s General Conference.

She seemed surprised, Jeff recalled, and worried.

The son asked: “Mom, what did you think this job was?”

Parkin then said, “I think I’ll be sick for a month.”

During her presidency, of course, she spoke several times at the giant gathering, especially assuring the women of God’s love.

“Just as the motto of Relief Society reminds us that ‘charity never faileth,’ we must believe that the love of Christ will never fail us,” she said at the women’s meeting in 2006. “All that we do in Relief Society should reflect the love of our Savior and the love of our Heavenly Father. This great love should be the source of our motivation to serve others. It must be both our point of origin and our destination.”

A life of service

Parkin was born Aug. 4, 1940, in Murray and grew up on a farm in Herriman. She earned a bachelor’s degree in elementary education and early childhood development from Utah State University. She married Jim Parkin in 1963 (they met on a blind date) and later moved to Seattle for his medical residency at the University of Washington, before returning to the Beehive State.

In Utah, Bonnie Parkin reared four sons while being a PTA president, volunteering on school community councils, and helping with reading and tutoring programs. Besides laboring in congregational positions, she also served in the worldwide Young Women presidency and on the Relief Society’s general board.

When Jim Parkin retired as an ear, nose and throat surgeon, the couple led the church’s London South Mission. During the first 11 days of the assignment, Bonnie contracted a virus and lost the hearing in her right ear. It didn’t slow her down.

Nothing could, Jeff Parkin said.

Her farm work ethic was “legendary in the family,” he said. “She loved order and neatness and could iron a shirt better than any dry cleaner, and she was good at getting things done.”

She had a gift for good listening, Jeff said, “with a tender heart and ability to connect. She cried with women all over the world as they shared their joys and sorrows.”

Parkin “didn’t like to lecture women on how to be,” the son said, preferring to hear “what they had to say about their experiences.”

She had a terrific sense of humor, he added, and a saucy “farm vocabulary.”

Since her death, Jeff noted, the family — which now includes four sons and their wives, 18 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren — has heard from hundreds of people who shared what Parkin meant to them and all she had given them.

Her years in the Relief Society left her feeling “renewed, strengthened and committed to be a better wife and mother and daughter of God,” Parkin said in a 2004 address. “My heart has been enlarged with gospel understanding and with love of the Savior and what he’s done for me.”

Parkin is the third Relief Society general president to die in the past six months. Mary Ellen Smoot, the organization’s 13th leader, died in February; and Elaine Jack, the 12th, died in June.