One of my ex-wife’s cousins, about 5 years younger than her, has an adult son who is in his early 40’s by now. I’ve lost track of all her kids since our divorce. The cousin is the daughter of her aunt and they’ve always been friends, although my ex sometimes just shakes her head.

When the son was a senior in high school, he went with his dad and neighbors (not scouts or priests quorum) to go snowmobiling. Neither he nor his dad had been on a snowmobile before. By about 4pm that day, the machine broke down and he made a wrong turn, and he got lost from the group. He spent all night out in the snow up by Heber City. They found him about 7am (rescue people etc.) and he had been crawling around all night in a circle, looking for his gloves. The snowmobile had broken down.

His hands and feet were frozen and he lost most of one foot and his fingers and had major surgeries. I haven’t seen him for a while, but still today, his hands look as if he’s wearing gloves all the time. No fingers but I think he does have thumbs that were rebuilt. He also has a prosthetic foot on one side. He refused to wear cover up things after all the surgery was done, and the way the rebuild was done was actually pretty remarkable.

While he was in the hospital, someone arranged for Monsoon to come visit him and give him a blessing. I don’t know who it was but it caused quite a stir that day. After he had several surgeries (I’ve lost track of all the details) he was home recovering and having therapy and Monsoon came to visit a couple more times, which made the local ward members really happy. Unfortunately, they couldn't get all the people in the house while he was there.

After recovery, he went on a mission and he’s had a good life mostly, married to a psycho and that’s over, but he ended up with their daughter and raises her alone. She’s about 13 now. He also works with the homeless here in SLC, not sure what he does but he has given lots of service.

And since Tommy’s death, his mom, her sister, and all of the friends and relatives who were around at the time, have been reliving the story on Facebook and Instagram which I guess is to be expected.

**Once again, apolggies for not being able to tell a short story**

My cousin has a story about Monson. She took my uncle to see him speak. My uncle had had a stroke and was in a wheel chair. He really wanted to meet Monson but my cousin was unable to get the wheel chair close enough. Monson saw him from a distance and came over and spent some time talking to him. I am not a fan, but that was a kind thing to do and made my uncle very happy.

I think this happened with him lots of times before he got to be the profit, from what I've read from other people since he died.

The closest I ever got to a apostle was probably about 1990. I worked at ZCMI in the Southtowne Mall, in Sandy.

The store manager came one day and said Marvin J. Ashton wanted a particular pair of shoes. He had narrow feet and we carried one brand of mens shoes in narrows widths.

He came in with the store manager, got the shoes and wore them about a month and then the store manager brought them back, and said he wanted a refund. They hurt his feet :)

I do remember that this was before Monson was prophet. Hinckley was prophet when my uncle died.

That's a remarkable story about your ex-wife's cousin. That he survived.

I don't remember all the details but for the first week or 10 days it seems, he was in a coma a good part of that and there was some doubt that he would make it.

So maybe not even the Corporation Sole of the mormon church can drive all humanity from someone? That's hopeful.

Still, it appears that the deeper Tommy got into the corporation, the less human he was. Sad, but not surprising. Mormonism is really, really good at taking what would ordinarily be perfectly decent human beings, and turning them into despicable, detestable ones. It's a cancer of the mind, and of the normal human instincts to be kind. It eats away at both until little is left, and you wind up spending billions of "charitably contributed" dollars to build a worthless mall so you can say on TV, "let's go shopping!" So sad.