I’m sure you have all read the news that Matthew Perry, one of the six stars of the TV comedy Friends, died on Saturday at age 54 (here is the WaPo obituary). Despite fame and fortune, he struggled with addiction most of his adult life and attended rehab dozens of times. All the early evidence suggests his death at his home near Los Angeles was accidental. According to everything I’ve read, he was very talented, a good friend, and literally everyone seemed to like him. Here’s something I learned reading the linked obituary: as a teenager, he was a top-ranked junior tennis player in Canada. He died too early, which is always something of a tragedy.

Nietzsche famously said, “Many die too late and some die too early. Still the doctrine sounds strange: Die at the right time.” Just because there is a too early and a too late doesn’t mean there is necessarily a particular right time to die. There might be years, even decades, between too early and too late. When it comes to losing an older good friend or aging close relative, no matter when they pass might seem too early to you. From an individual perspective, I think maybe the right time to die is any time after both parents have passed away but before any of the children have. Theoden: “No parent should have to bury their child.”

But let’s move from the personal pain of such a loss (and my sympathies to any reader for whom this is a difficult topic) to the cases which have a public aspect. Again, Nietzsche thought that Jesus died too early. That if he had lived many more years, the character of his teachings would have changed, perhaps mellowed out a bit. You can probably think of some modern figures to nominate for dying too early. John F. Kennedy, Jr. Princess Diana. Kobe Bryant. John Lennon. Elvis. But let’s talk about some Mormon examples.

Joseph Smith died too early. The orthodox, correlated view is that Joseph Smith’s work was done and that he had passed all required priesthood and leadership “keys” to other LDS leaders before he died. Well of course that’s what they are going to say. But it’s pretty clear that if Joseph had lived to a ripe old age, he would certainly have continued to teach new doctrines and change or drop some existing teachings, he would have formed new quorums and councils, and he would have added new Mormon practices. In particular, he would at some point have had to acknowledge the secret LDS practice of plural marriage by himself and some of his close associates, and would probably have publicly renounced the doctrine and practice. Think how different subsequent LDS history would have been! (I suspect that quite a few active LDS do not know that Joseph never publicly acknowledged the practice of plural marriage before his death at age 38 — because the oh-so-delicate treatment of polygamy in the curriculum and correlated LDS sources rarely notes that it was a secret practice during Joseph’s lifetime, unknown even to most of the thousands of Mormons who lived in or near Nauvoo and entirely unknown to Mormons outside Nauvoo and to the wider public.)

There is a counter-argument to be made. It runs like this: Joseph’s personality and leadership style was never directed towards stability and calm. He was always stirring the pot and provoking conflict with the locals. He never let the Church as a body settle down and be about the business of building a life and quietly growing the Church. There was always another Zion to move to, leaving problems behind. If Joseph had lived another ten years, the Church would have blown up, either splintering into several smaller offshoots destined for eventual irrelevance or else just completely withering away. On this view, Joseph’s death and Brigham Young’s emergence as the new Mormon leader saved the Church. For the Church, Brigham was the right man at the right time.

President Benson died too late. All LDS presidents now die old because they are already old when they take office, but you can argue that Ezra Taft Benson died not just old but too late. He died in May 1994. After speaking at his 90th birthday celebration in 1989, he made very few public appearances. It is likely that the effects of advancing dementia meant that in those last five years he was not making many or even any of the decisions that an LDS president usually makes or leading the Church in any meaningful sense. But power abhors a vacuum. When the LDS president is incapacitated, power shifts to the counselors in the First Presidency (who act in his name), to the President of the Twelve (particularly if he rather than one of the counselors is going to succeed the ailing President), and also to individual apostles who might feel the freedom to act on their own without the usual oversight and direction of an active and fully functioning LDS president. You only get rogue apostles when the President is weak or incapacitated.

Which brings us to September 1993, during the last year of President Benson’s illness, and the September Six (discussed recently on the blog in a series of posts). The Church has never issued an official account of that episode, although there are certainly individuals within the leadership that knew the details and documents that provide a fuller story. The Church does its best to pretend it never happened, which is always easier than acknowledging a messy institutional event and then having to explain it. But piecing together facts that are available, it seems clear that one or two apostles acted on their own to contact local leaders of several LDS academics and authors to suggest that disciplinary action ought to be taken. And when an apostle says jump, a local leader doesn’t ask for an official memo — he asks, “How high?” Well, not all. There were apparently a few who slow walked the “suggested” action and never did take the suggested action.

But the damage was done, and here we are thirty years later still talking about the September Six. There is a good chance those events would not have happened had there been a fully capable LDS President exercising the usual powers of leadership and supervision over the other apostles — his counselors and the apostles in the quorum. A similar argument could be made about President McKay dying too late. In his later years, he was not incapacitated to the extent of some aging LDS presidents, but he did retreat from active leadership to an extent. As a result, the young and ambitious Ezra Taft Benson had more latitude to spread his wacky political ideas and preach them in General Conference. Other apostles objected privately, but President McKay never really reined him in. And, as with the September Six episode, the Church is still suffering the ill effects of Benson’s antics. That so many rank and file Mormons and some senior leaders are currently enamored with former President Trump — and with other extremist conservative political figures — is the unfortunate consequence of Benson’s unchecked words and actions, and ultimately the consequence of President McKay’s decline in his final years.

A clear conclusion is that the current LDS leadership structure and practice is broken and needs to be adjusted. It is simply a very bad institutional scenario to have the official leader of the Church unable to make the usual decisions and unable to exercise the powers of leadership. That the next LDS president is always the longest serving apostle, and therefore almost always the oldest apostle, guarantees that the kind of institutional mistakes recounted in previous paragraphs will happen regularly. I could add other examples. I’ve discussed this problem in a previous post, so I won’t rehash it in detail again. How about all apostles go emeritus at age 80? How about we pull a name out of a hat for the next President? Or maybe call the youngest apostle to be the next President instead of the oldest? That would shake things up.

In conclusion … oh, I don’t know. You can talk about the Mormon stuff. You can talk about the pain of losing too early a beloved public figure you admired. You can share your favorite episode of Friends. Live long and prosper.