Astrid Tuminez was on her way to Rome, the trip a kind of pilgrimage after months of grief. Her husband, Jeffrey Tolk, had died suddenly earlier in the year, and the loss had left her carrying a weight she couldn’t set down. “I felt darkness and a rage I’d never known before. It was like a tectonic shift in my reality,” she said.
Tuminez imagined quiet days walking through old churches, sitting in dim chapels in Rome. As part of her spiritual healing, she hoped her schedule held a meeting with Pope Leo. But as her flight landed in Atlanta for a short connection, her phone lit up. One sentence, again and again: “Charlie has been shot.”
Tuminez remembers the moment less as a thought than something her body absorbed all at once. “Our bodies feel these things. Just utter shock, like my whole body was on fire,” she said in her office at Utah Valley University (UVU) in November. “And then I had to find my inner quiet, because when something like that happens as a leader, you realize it has real consequences.”
