You Are Still a Mother (Part Three) – Jackie Gibson

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You Are Still a Mother (Part Three)

Guests:Jackie & Jonathan Gibson

From the series:You Are Still a Mother (Day 3 of 3)

Air date:May 9, 2025

Jonathan:We tend to retreat from grief and sort of go into ourselves, and we also tend to think that children can’t handle it, but they’re actually tougher than we think in some ways. And then by bringing Ben into our grief, he wrote it better than we did in some respects, and he actually buoyed us in our grief by being with us in that time.

Ann:Welcome to FamilyLife Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I’m Ann Wilson.

Dave:And I’m Dave Wilson. And you can find us at FamilyLifeToday.com. This is FamilyLife Today.

Alright, so we’ve got a special guest. We have Jackie (Gibson) in the studio, and we talked about Johnny a lot in the last episode, but now we get to meet him.

Jackie:Now we get to hear from the man himself.

Dave:Johnny, welcome to FamilyLife Today.

Jonathan:Well thanks Dave and Ann for having me on. It’s a nice surprise.

Dave:Yeah. My first question is, you’re at home with the kids and Jackie’s lounging around in the pool in Florida, how’s it going with the kids?

Jonathan:Let’s just say it’s going.

Dave:We should ask them how it’s going.

Jonathan:It’s going downhill very quickly.

Ann:Well, we have loved getting to talk to Jackie, and as we were finishing up, Johnny, she was saying, “You guys should read my husband’s book The Moon is Always Round, and so—

Dave:Of course she talked about her book much more than yours, but then she threw out a carrot for you.

Ann:But she did say, it’s your best book.

Jackie:It’s true.

Ann:And then so we looked it up on Amazon, but you have a promo video. I mean, I was crying, it’s so powerful and beautiful about the miscarriage of Leila. So can you just tell us a little bit about that, of even what prompted you to write the book?

Jonathan:Yeah, so as Jackie will have explained on this episode or program, we in 2016 had the tragedy of a little girl who we were expecting to come into our family at nine months, our daughter Leila, and she died in the womb and then was stillborn four days later. And as we were trying to deal with the grief of all of that, we brought Ben to the hospital to meet his little sister. We had an older son, Ben, four years older. He was three and a half actually at the time. And we brought him to the hospital to meet Leila. We wanted him to have as much tangible memory of meeting her as possible. And we spent four hours together in the hospital.

Then I drove him home to be with a friend for the night who was going to stay over at our house, and I would go back to the hospital and spend the night with Jackie. In the car on the way home, Ben said to me as it was just silence and I was crying in the front and Ben said to me, “Daddy, do you think mommy will ever grow a baby that wakes up?” Because he had met Leila, held her, but obviously her eyes were closed, and she never woke up. And I said, “Well, Ben, I don’t know. Let’s pray that she does.” Then he said, “Why isn’t Leila coming home with us?” And I said, “Well, because Jesus called her name and she went to Him.” He said, “When she’s been with Jesus a few days, will she come to us?” And I said, “No, Ben, when you’re with Jesus, you don’t want to go anywhere else.” And then he said, “Does she not like us?” And I said, “No, she does like us. It’s just that she loves Jesus more.” And I said, “She’s not going to come back to us. We’re going to have to go to her one day.”

And then I said, “Ben, remember the little catechism I taught you?” I had taught him six months previous, this little catechism in the evenings because he was fascinated with the moon. And so I would hold him up at our bedroom window and we’d look for the moon and I’d say, “Ben, what shape is the moon tonight?” And he would say, “It’s a slice of an apple,” or “It’s a banana moon,” or “It’s a little orange moon,” like a three-quarter moon. And then I would say to him, “But what shape has the moon always been?” And I taught him to say, “The moon is always round.” And then I would say, “And what does that mean?” And he would say, “God is always good.”

And so I just taught him this little catechism six months prior to Leila dying. Never knew that it would come in into good use. But that night in the car, I said, “So Ben, do you remember the catechism that I taught you about the moon?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Tonight, Ben, it’s hard to see the whole of the moon, but we need to remember that the moon is always round, and God is always good, even though we can’t understand why Leila’s not coming home to us.”

And so that was a conversation I had with my son. He was three and a half years old, and I thought, “What a conversation with a three-and-a-half-year-old asking after she’s been with Jesus a few days, will she come back to us as he was just trying to work it all out in his little mind.” And it struck me so much that a few days after that conversation, I took out my phone and I thought, “I don’t want to forget this conversation.” So I just wrote it down on my phone in a little Notes app, put it away.

And then a year later, by that stage, we had had the funeral of Leila. We moved nine months after that to the United States for me to work at Westminster Theological Seminary. And then one night when I was procrastinating before a lecture, when I should have been preparing a lecture, I thought, “I’m going to write a book about that conversation.” And so I started writing a kid’s book, and long story short, it evolved into the book that you’re talking about called The Moon is Always Round.

It’s basically a book about the conversation that Ben and I had in the car that night and me talking about different stages of Jackie’s pregnancy and what shape the moon was at different stages, but this repeated line is throughout the book, but the moon is always round. So that’s the book; it’s told from Ben’s perspective, “When my mommy was expecting a baby, the moon looked like a banana.” And so it goes through, and it’s told from his perspective, but “My dad said the moon is always round.” That’s the repeated line on each page.

Dave:I mean, that’s just beautiful. I’m in tears. I haven’t even seen the book yet. I’ve just seen your video and heard you tell that story. And I think part of my tenderness is I had a little brother die when I was seven. He was five and a half. And my mom—my dad was gone by that time, divorced, but my mom and I never talked about it. It was unspoken for decades. And the fact that you entered into your children, and I know Jackie told us you’re still talking about Leila with them, but to be able to walk with them and answer questions and walk through grief, that’s such a model for parents to do. We need to do that. Way to go.

Ann:You don’t know this Dave, but I already ordered books because it’s such a great conversation.

Jonathan:I think that we tend to retreat from grief and sort of go into ourselves, and we also tend to think that children can’t handle it, but they’re actually tougher than we think in some ways. And then by bringing Ben into our grief, we found that he actually sort of wrote it. He was upset and confused, but he wrote it as better than we did in some respects. And he actually buoyed us in our grief by being with us in that time.

But yeah, it’s a generational thing. I think my grandmother had two children born at six months; one lived for 55 minutes, the other for nine hours. And my mother only discovered this 20 years after my grandmother had passed away, that she had two other brothers. Her grandmother, her mother, never told her about these two boys. And so I do think it was a generational thing in a sense, but we have found it a great help for the process of our own grief, but also we want our children to grow up knowing they have a sister in heaven, and that might even make them more motivated to be Christian and want to meet their sister one day.

Ann:Johnny, we talked about just as Jackie dealt with her grief and you gave her space in that, can we just ask you, how did you deal with your grief?

Jonathan:Yeah, I find after Leila was buried, I would visit her grave three or four times a week. I was a pastor in Cambridge at the time, and I would go out on pastoral visits, and I would always think, right, I can nip by the grave here on my way to visit this person or that person. So I would do that. And even if it was just five or ten minutes, for me, it was the time to go to cry, to pray.

Of course, we believe Leila in soul was in heaven, but we also believed her body was in the grave, obviously, and that there’s a sense in which Leila’s in the grave. I wouldn’t talk to her or anything like that, but I just felt close to her. And perhaps you’ve talked about this with Jackie, about the importance of the grief. That’s where she will rise from the dead. And so that place became very special to me, to us.

And then our tradition became that every Sunday after I would lead worship and preach, we would make our way back from church via the grave and sort of have a picnic in the graveyard. And that became sort of a Sunday routine. So for me, it was being at the grave on my own, but with my family on Sundays and really just reflecting on her and her life and then talking to my brothers and my dad and mom and others close to me, I find that helpful.

And there were people in our church who reached out to us who said, 37 years ago, I had a stillborn daughter or stillborn son, people in your church you’ve known for decades, and you don’t know that that’s their experience. And it all came out for them when our daughter died. And so I find it helpful talking to people like that as well.

I think the body of Christ was so real to us in those days of grief, the people coming and giving us meals, praying for us. Our minister prayed every week in church for us.

Ann:So sweet.

Jonathan:Yeah, I still remember that night. And then it started as the year went on, it sort of became a bit less. Once a month he would pray for us, but it was really helpful that he had us on his heart for those weeks and months after. So those kinds of things helped me process my grief.

Dave:Yeah. A question we didn’t ask you, Jackie, and now we got Johnny and you together, how did this journey affect your marriage? Every marriage is different. Every road of grief is different, but it impacts a marriage. So either one of you or both of you, from your perspective, how did this impact your marriage?

Jackie:A couple episodes ago, I was talking about the fact that you enter into the valley together, but then your journey within the valley can be very different. And we certainly found that to be true. I think initially you are going through that raw grief and shock together and you feel very close in that grief in the days following the loss. And then as time goes by, there are days I would be more sad, and other days Johnny would be more sad. And it was sometimes tricky to enter into the other person’s grief when you’re feeling differently that day or something else has been hard.

I would say overall, thankfully by God’s grace, this suffering brought us closer together and strengthened our marriage and strengthened us even as we do ministry now as a couple, ministering to other couples has been a gift to us that we can enter into other people’s grief having gone through that together. So I would say this will not be everyone’s story, but for us it was positive that it strengthened us in our marriage.

Ann:You’ve walked through the valley together.

Jackie:We walked through it together.

Dave:Do you feel the same, Johnny?

Jonathan:Yes, very much so. I think Jackie’s put it quite accurately there. We entered together and we’re very close in the early months. And then as I said, I would go visit the grave three, four times a week. Jackie didn’t feel the need to. Sometimes I would be a bit upset that she didn’t want to come during the week, but she also didn’t have the time I had because I was out in the car. But for her once a week was enough. That was fine for me. I wanted to go as often as I could. And so that’s where we sort of cut our own trail in the grief path for the months following but we always stayed close together through it.

And I think the key thing was just talking together about it and listening to each other. And as Jackie said, there were some days I wasn’t quite in the sore spot that she was. And so she would be upset, and I would have to come alongside her. And you sort of have to jump out of your mood that you’re in and sort of go back into that and then vice versa. But I think we also gave each other space. We gave each other space to be sad, but also space to not be sad some days. Of course, that first year we were sad every day. But I just mean as the years have gone on, there’s times where we also give each other space to not have to be grieving all the time about it.

Jackie:I also want to say I’m so grateful that I have a husband who was willing to express grief deeply. He was not afraid to cry in front of other people. And I think possibly that can be harder for men. Maybe they feel like they need to show their strength in a way that’s like, bite your lip and hold it together for the family. But actually that was such a gift to me that my husband was willing to enter into that grief, express it, share it with others, share it with other men, even if that meant those men felt a little uncomfortable, but it then gives permission to other men. You’re allowed to grieve this. This was your loss too. This was your daughter; you’re a father.

Dave:I mean Johnny, is that something you’ve always been comfortable doing? Or Jackie you could even answer, or is it something that became more comfortable because of this journey?

Jackie:I’d say he has always had a tender heart, but those tears probably come more easily now just after the death of Leila for sure.

Jonathan:Yeah, I was brought up with a father who was very measured, very quiet, but he expressed his emotions and grief. I still remember him crying at his father’s funeral, my papa who died suddenly on the farm. He was a farmer, and it was a shock to us all that he died. He just had a heart attack one night and died. And I still remember watching my dad really physically weeping at his funeral, like nearly uncontrollably. And I sort of, that’s an image I’ll always remember. So I had a father who cried openly over things like this.

So in one sense I was used to that. But I would say the first year, whenever I would be in the car on my own, I would just start crying. It was this bizarre thing. Jackie and I would talk about this, and I would literally start whimpering. I would have this whimpering sigh come out of me. Nobody was in the car with me, but I would just start crying because our daughter had died. And it was often when I was with someone in the car, and I drop them off and then I would go back home alone. I would just start crying. And I then find when I was preaching, and I still find it sometimes. I preach now on a weekly basis. I still find myself randomly in a sermon, get emotional on a point sometimes that’s not even that emotional.

And it happened just actually Sunday past as I was making my final point. I could feel myself getting emotional and I was thinking, “This isn’t even that emotional point,” but I thought “This is part of the scar and brokenness that I have now;” that when I’m in public, when I’m speaking, preaching, I can just find myself get emotional. And so I don’t not like that. It’s more just I have to be careful it doesn’t become a distraction. But yeah, that’s the way I’ve expressed it over the years and as it sort of catches me sometimes, even now.

Dave:Is there a sense in a marriage when one of you is feeling that whimpering crying and the other isn’t? And I know that journey happens because different for each of you and Johnny, you said you got upset sometimes she didn’t want to go to the graveside. Do you get upset when the other isn’t where you are and what does that look like and how do you manage it?

Jonathan:I think that that I mentioned earlier about giving each other space. I think what I learned early on was Jackie, we’re going in this valley together, but the Lord is her shepherd, and He is my shepherd. He’s our shepherd together but Psalm 23, it’s so personal, isn’t it? The Lord is my shepherd. And so I had to accept that Jackie had her own journey with her shepherd, and I had my journey with my shepherd. Obviously, the same shepherd, but He walked us through that valley differently.

And that helped me to know that she wasn’t alone, and I needed to let her go with her Savior through that valley. And I wasn’t alone. And then obviously we were together as well in another sense, and he was leading both of us. But that was helpful to me to think that the Lord is her shepherd. And so I can entrust her to him on the days where she’s maybe not feeling as sad as I am, or maybe she’s more sad than I am, but I can entrust her to her Savior, the Good Shepherd.

Ann:And Johnny I can relate to as you’re preaching, how you just become emotional out of nowhere maybe. And I had told Jackie that my sister died when she was only 45. And as I was grieving that and she was my best friend, when I would go to church and worship, I couldn’t sing because if I did, there’s a connection I think, between our soul and our heart because if I would start to sing, I would well up to it would be uncontrollable. I would have to just lay on the floor and grieve, I think. But there’s something, so when we’re in church and we connect our heart and our soul and all those pieces together.

Dave:And the community.

Ann:And the community, there’s an emotion that rises up that I think is so beautiful and healing, but it can also be embarrassing.

Jonathan:Yeah. Yeah. We had the same experience. I think, Jackie, you can speak for yourself on this one, but I recall not being able to sing the opening hymn at first. I would just start singing and just start crying.

Jackie:Oh yeah, I remember that. We were just sort of shoulders shaking next to each other, unable to get the words out.

Jonathan:And yet we wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. It wasn’t like we were feeling awkward. It was more we just are overwhelmed.

Ann:But you needed it.

Jonathan:But the singing was so beautiful.

Jackie:You needed it desperately.

Jonathan:And you spoke about church there. There’s the connection in your soul with your heart and singing and people around you. For us, it also became a connection with Leila because Hebrews chapter 12, verse 22 to 24, we have not come to Mount Sinai, but we have come to Mount Zion, the city of the living God, to an innumerable company of angels, to the judge of all and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect.

And that’s our loved ones in Christ who have gone before us. And so when they die, actually for us going to church was when we got to be with Leila because we were joining the invisible church in heaven. The visible church on Earth was joining that choir for that one hour of worship. And we were present with her. She worships by sight. We were worshiping by faith, but we were both worshiping in the same worship service.

Jackie:It’s like you sing the doxology, praise him above ye heavenly hosts, that I’d think of Leila every time we sing that on a Sunday.

Dave:Wow.

Jonathan:So that’s for us why church also became a deeply important and emotional day. But it was a lovely day because we were like, “Let’s go to church. We’re going to go and be with Leila.”

I taught my kids another catechism and my two younger kids who were born after Leila, but taught Bennett as well. On the Lord’s Day, on a Sunday, I would say, “What day is it?” And they would say, “It’s the Lord’s Day.” And I would say, “What do we do on the Lord’s Day?” And they would say, “We eat croissants and pancakes.” And I say, “Yeah, that’s right. We do. And where do we go?” And they say, “We go to church.” And I say, “What do we do at church?” “We worship the triune God.” And then I would say, “And who do we get to do it with?” And they answer, “With Leila.” And then I say, “Where’s Leila?” and they point up and they say, “In heaven.” And I say, “Who’s she with?” They say, “With Jesus.” And I say, “What’s she doing?” And they say, “Singing with the angels.”

And so that’s our little catechism; don’t do it as often now. But when they were really young, that’s what I taught them. I wanted them to realize, we are going to church, but we are going to join another church that’s invisible. And that your little sister for Ben, big sister for Zach and Hannah is present and singing with the angels.

Dave:And you’ve got us all crying in the studio.

Jackie:A lot of sniffling here.

Dave:I think I want to sign up for your Old Testament course, man, you’re quite a teacher.

Ann:And I’m just thinking of listeners that are thinking, my kids are complaining about going to church and we don’t even want to go to church. This is why the catechism is so important. Like you’re building foundations for your kids of what’s truly happening and why it’s so important. And I don’t know about you, Dave, but I can only picture all of you in heaven having a picnic with Leila actually being in your presence physically—

Dave:—with the daffodils.

Ann:—to see with the daffodils. Yes. And that’s our hope. That’s the hope of the gospel for all of us; that we will one day be with those who have trusted Jesus. Can we just cry anymore right now?

Ann:And I just want to say thank you to both of you because it’s been nine years, and yet you are still helping people walk through, keep their eyes on Jesus, to teach us how to do this together in a marriage, how the church is still so important and it helps us to heal, and just being open to sharing your story has brought us incredible joy and comfort.

Dave:I mean, you know this, but this is your mission, this is your call, and you’re doing it so well.

Ann:I think they have a lot of calls. Can you guys just come down to Florida and be with us a whole bunch and parent and teach us how to do catechisms with our children and grandchildren?

Jonathan:Did Jackie tell you what we called our daughter? Did that come up in your conversation?

Jackie:No. That’s a good time to share that.

Jonathan:Dave, you said this is your mission. Well, at Leila’s funeral, there were about 180 people came to her funeral

And the minister, 180 people who never saw her, only two people in that church had ever held her or saw her, seen her apart from Jackie and I, the minister and Jackie’s best friend Sarah. But in the sermon, in the middle of the sermon he’s preaching, and he said, “Leila’s testimony was a great testimony.” And I thought, “Where is he going with this? She never gave her testimony. She never lived outside of the womb.” He said, “Hers was a great testimony. She pointed us all to another world. She pointed us all to God.” And then he just had this offline comment that he said was not in his notes. He said, “Leila, the evangelist.” And everyone, there’s some more tears for you, Ann.

Ann:Yes,

Jonathan:And everyone who was there, to this day, if they talk about Leila’s funeral, they say, “We’ve never forgotten Leila, the evangelist.” And so for us, this book that I wrote The Moon is Always Round, the book Jackie has written, we see it as our daughter’s ministry. So Dave, you said you’re on mission, you’ll be given a mission and you’re right, we have, and it’s our daughter’s ministry. She being dead yet speaks. And she only lived for nine months, but she has reached so many more people than I as a preacher of the gospel will ever reach. That book is over, The Moon is Always Round, it’s over 30,000 copies sold and it’s still selling well.

And for those listening, every dollar of that book goes into a fund called Leila, the Evangelist. So all the royalties go into Leila, the Evangelist Fund, and we are saving up that fund to support people at seminary to then go and be evangelists like our daughter was.

So you’re right, we’ve been handed a mission, and this is why when Jackie got the invite from you, she said, “I can’t go to Florida.” And I was like, “Yes, you can’t. That means I have to look after three kids at home. Yes, you can’t.” But then I thought, “That’s crazy, Florida, two days I am too busy.” And then I thought, “No, that’s my daughter’s ministry so Jackie must go to Florida. And so that’s what we view it as. We accept these kinds of invitations even when they don’t suit our timetable because we think, “No, this is the way we serve our daughter’s ministry.”

Ann:It’s beautiful. And I would ask our listeners, what is your mission? Because God has given each of us a mission as long as we have breath in our lungs. What is your mission?

Dave:I got my voice back now. I can talk but, in that moment, it was so tender, and Johnny was so great to have after a couple days with Jackie just to hear his heart. He was wonderful. And Johnny wrote a book as well. It’s called The Moon is Always Round, and it’s just a powerful truth to sort of teach your children. You can get it. It’s in our show notes, a link there, FamilyLifeToday.com. Just go there and click on that link and you can buy that book as well as if you’d like to get Jackie’s book, You Are Still a Mother. That’s there as well, FamilyLifeToday.com.

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