In this episode of the CCL podcast, we speak to Jackie Gibson about her book, You are Still a Mother. The book recounts how Jackie and her husband Jonny lost their daughter Leila just before she was due to be born. Through this terrible experience, Jackie came to appreciate the comfort of the Lord Jesus.
We hope this episode is of comfort to you if you’ve experienced this kind of grief, or that it helps you to care for a friend or family member who has gone through something similar.
Links referred to:
- You are Still a Mother (Jackie Gibson)
- The Moon is Always Round (Jonathan Gibson)
- Our August event: Affluent and Christian? Material goods, the King and the kingdom with Michael Jensen and Emma Penzo (21 August 2024)
- Support the work of the Centre
Runtime: 24:29 min.
Transcript
Please note: This transcript has been edited for readability.
Introduction
Peter Orr: In today’s episode, we’re speaking to Jackie Gibson about her book, You are Still a Mother. The book recounts how Jackie and her husband Jonny lost their daughter Leila just before she was due to be born. Through this terrible experience, Jackie came to appreciate the comfort of the Lord Jesus, and she writes powerfully about that in the book.
I hope that this episode is of comfort to you if you’ve experienced this kind of grief, or that it helps you to care for a friend or family member who has gone through something similar.
[Music]
PO: Welcome to Moore College’s Centre for Christian Living podcast. Today we’re speaking to Jackie Gibson about her book, You are Still a Mother: Hope for women grieving a stillbirth or miscarriage. Hi Jackie! Great to have you on the podcast. Could you start by telling us a little bit about your family and how you became a Christian?
Jackie Gibson: Thanks for having me, Pete! As you said, I’m Jackie. I am married to Jonny, and we are currently living in Philadelphia in the US—though, as you can hear from the accent, I am a native to Australia, just living far away. We have three kids at home: Ben, who’s 11; Zach, who’s just turned five; and Hannah, who’s just turned four.
I grew up in a Christian family. My parents taught my sister and I the gospel from an early age. But I went through a period around the age of nine or ten, where I started to really not enjoy being taken to church, and I was grumbling and complaining about this. I think from my parents’ perspective, my heart was very hard at this stage, and they were praying a lot for me. Mum had asked other women in the church to pray for me as well. Their prayers were very obviously answered: I went on a CRU (Crusader Union of Australia) camp and really met the Lord Jesus as a friend and saviour, I had a total change of heart, and I came back converted. That’s how I became a Christian: I had heard the gospel, but really understood it for the first time around the age of 12 at a Christian camp.
PO: Wonderful.
March 2016
PO: This book you’ve written, You are Still a Mother: take us back to 13 March 2016.
JG: Jonny and I were living in Cambridge, England, at the time. We had our first son Ben, who was about three and a half. We were longing for more children, but entered a season of waiting and not being able to conceive as quickly as we had with Ben, which we had assumed would happen a second time.
After about two years, we got that positive pregnancy test: the Lord had given us another child. We were overjoyed, and we felt that the Lord had heard our prayers and answered them. So we assumed that this second child would come into our family just like Ben had the first time.
My pregnancy was pretty straightforward and normal. All the scans were normal. Nine months passed pretty quickly. But three or four days before our due date, I felt the movements had slowed. Having spoken to a nurse on the phone, she assured me that end-of-pregnancy nerves were pretty common, and told me to lie on my side and count kicks—which I did do and felt movements, and so the nurse assured us that it was nothing to worry about; we were fine.
But the next morning, I felt like there were no movements anymore. So Jonny and I drove to hospital that day, and we were shocked when they told us that there was no heartbeat and that our baby had died, right at the very end of pregnancy. It was a total shock. We hadn’t heard of this happening. I remember feeling relieved when we got through the 20-week scan—the anomaly scan—and when that was normal, I just thought, “Great! We’ll have a baby in 20 more weeks.”
We then had to wait three days to actually give birth. Our daughter Leila was stillborn. This was in 2016 on 17 March. It was, as I said, it was a huge shock, and we were plunged into darkness at that point.
Early days of grief
PO: You’re away from your family and living in Cambridge. Johnny’s family were away. How did you cope with that—the initial grief and trauma?
JG: We went into complete shock, as I said. Thankfully, though our family were far away, our church family was close. They drew very near to us during those very dark days.
I think in those very early days, we were very aware of God’s presence with us, and his care for us, even though we couldn’t believe this had happened and we were experiencing terrible grief.
The worst days were the days between her death and her birth. But I remember feeling a closeness with the Lord Jesus that I had never experienced before, and thinking of him in the Garden of Gethsemane, looking ahead to his crucifixion, and knowing he understood my terror at having to give birth to this baby who had died. His suffering was immeasurably greater than mine, but I just felt a closeness with the Lord Jesus, the man of sorrows (Isa 53:3), in those days. So they were dark, but there was comfort from the Lord even in those days, and some of that comfort was met in the people who did surround us, brought us meals and prayed for us. Our pastor Ian showed up a lot. We did have support in those days, thankfully.
Later days of grief
PO: How did the grief evolve—the sharpness of the trauma of what happened, but also there’s the weeks, months and years that follow?
JG: The sharpness, as you said, is at its worst in the early days. And yet, I think we felt the most support in the early days of grief. But as the weeks and months went by, life moves on for everyone else. We just had to sort of pick up and carry on, and find a new normal, but everything in our whole world had changed. That was really hard.
As time went on between Leila’s stillbirth, we felt further and further away from her. So there’s a sense in which the pain softened over time, but it also became more complex over time as we moved further and further away from having met our daughter and held her. I remember when the first year anniversary went by: there was a sense of new grief—that we had moved a year beyond meeting our daughter and seeing her and holding her.
I think there’s no straightforward trajectory of grief, as you and many people know. But we do have a God who is binding up our wounds and who heals the broken-hearted. He certainly worked healing in our lives since Leila’s death, though we won’t get over it this side of heaven.
Believing in the darkness
PO: In time, you’ve come to write about your experience. The book is an incredibly powerful testimony to how you’ve found comfort in Scripture and the truths of the Gospel. You talk about “resting in the arms” and “believing in the darkness”; can you talk about those ideas a little bit please?
JG: I think when any of us goes through hard things and suffering, it’s very tempting for us to redefine what we know about God. I think it’s easy to believe the truths that God is good and kind and loves us when life is easy and we’re aware of all the blessings around us. But when hard providences come our way, certainly Jonny and I questioned God’s goodness and kindness to us. Having experienced that short season of infertility, which felt long to us, and then giving us a child, but then taking her away right at the end of pregnancy, it felt cruel.
I was helped by a few different things. One was a missionary woman called Lilias Trotter. She was a missionary to Algeria, if I remember correctly, in the early 1900s. During a hard season of her ministry there, she wrote in her diary, “Believe in the darkness what you have seen in the light”.1 I think that’s a beautiful reminder to us that though we’re in the darkness, it doesn’t change what’s true and always true—that God is sovereign and that he’s kind in all his ways, even when we can’t fully understand it.
We’ve had to go through a journey of reading the Scriptures, which are so clear to us—that God doesn’t change, but our sinful hearts want to accuse him of cruelty, even though we know things to be true and we ought to keep believing that they’re true.
Communing with Jesus in suffering
PO: You spoke a little bit about finding comfort in the experience of the Saviour, who went through suffering himself. Can you talk a little a bit about how that became more real in your own faith and life?
JG: I think suffering often feels very lonely for the sufferer. Certainly that was our experience. Especially a loss during a pregnancy: I think things have improved and it’s something that is talked about now than it was before, but it can still be a very lonely experience. We were grieving our daughter who no one knew—who no one had met. That’s a strange kind of grief. People came to her funeral having never met her. And even though Jonny and I grieved very much together and the Lord was kind in giving us unity through our grief, we had very different journeys as well, and felt different layers of grief at different times—Jonny as a father and me as a mother. So even within a loving marriage, suffering can feel lonely.
Those experiences that led me to the Lord Jesus, the man of sorrows, the only one who could truly understand all the facets of my grief that even my husband couldn’t fully understand—that as the man of sorrows who has known every grief, he was the only one who was with me in my suffering in a way that no other human could be. I think I had mentioned this earlier: the communion with him in suffering was a very sweet gift that I do feel like I couldn’t have received any other way. That was a blessing—to meet him again for the first time.
Responding to the “How many children?” question
PO: You talk in the book about how you feel when people ask you how many children you have. Can you say a little bit about that?
JG: I was even aware of it when I answered your question at the beginning—
PO: Yes! [Laughter]
JG: —when you said, “Share about your family.” I said, “I have three children at home.” It can be a complicated question for parents to answer when they’ve experienced the death of a baby in the womb. I wouldn’t tell people what they ought to say.
For Jonny and I, I say we have four children, because it’s true. Just as Leila’s life began at her conception, so too did my motherhood and Jonny’s fatherhood. We were given a daughter. So death didn’t sever that relationship. We don’t get to enjoy being her parents and raising her. But I do share with people that we have four children.
I’m borrowing phrasing from a minister from the 1600s when I say, “I have four children, all living, only my second lives with God.” I think that’s a beautiful way of expressing that reality. But I know that’s such an ache for mothers, especially, who have had miscarriages and later losses in pregnancy—that there’s nothing to show for your motherhood, and that’s one of the unique griefs of losing a child in the womb.
PO: And yet the title of your book, You are Still a Mother, really highlights that reality.
[Music]
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PO: The world is becoming wealthier and wealthier. Since the turn of the century, the net worth of many countries in the West and in Asia has tripled, poverty rates have fallen, and life expectancy has increased by more than six years.
At the same time, the divide between rich and poor has increased, with the richest one per cent owning almost fifty per cent of all the world’s wealth. Five to ten per cent of people still live in extreme poverty, even in the most affluent nations. Furthermore, while money can buy happiness, it can only do so up to a certain point, and wealthier people are more likely to be less generous and less kind to others.
How as Christians should we think about affluence? Is material prosperity a blessing or a curse, or both? Given the state of the world and income inequality, what are we to do with the riches God has given us? We’d love you to join us on 21 August when Michael Jensen, rector of St Mark’s Anglican Darling Point, and Emma Penzo will help us to see our earthly treasure the way our heavenly Father does.
And now let’s get back to our program.
The intermediate state
PO: Can you talk a little bit about your reflection on what’s called the “intermediate state”? Maybe you could say what that is and beyond that, the hope of the resurrection.
JG: Yes. I realised when Leila died that I didn’t really understand the intermediate state, as you said—the time when saints have died and gone straight to be with the Lord Jesus: “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). Their story isn’t finished yet. I think before Leila died, I always pictured saints who had died and gone to heaven as being in the New Creation with new bodies already. Even speaking to people who have experienced the death of a loved one, I’ve often heard that kind of language.
But it struck me that that wasn’t the case when we were in hospital and I was holding our baby Leila, who was seven pounds. I remember holding her and looking at Jonny and saying, “Hold on. But she’s with Jesus bodily?” and then realising, “Well, no, she can’t be. Here’s her body.” It’s been through that experience that I’ve come to understand that her soul is with the Lord Jesus, but we laid her body to rest in a grave. Her body is awaiting the resurrection, where her soul and body will be reunited and made new.
At our graveside burial for Leila, our minister, Ian Hamilton, said, “The enduring hope of the Christian is not the the immortality of the soul, but the resurrection of the body.” We’ve come to understand that in new and deeper ways—that Leila’s story is not finished yet. She is with Jesus, which is “better by far”, as Paul says (Phil 1:23). But it’s not yet best. She’s awaiting her new creation imperishable resurrection body, when Jesus comes again and makes all things new. So I have a new and growing understanding of that, and I have a new appreciation for the preciousness of the body and the body of someone who has died.
Again, our experience of having a baby die is a unique type of loss, compared to other deaths—like of someone you knew longer. But Jonny and I spent two days in the hospital with Leila’s body, which maybe sounds very strange to some people. But she was our daughter and she was beautiful and made in God’s image. We felt the preciousness of her body, knowing that her body is like a seed planted when we buried her that will one day rise again, thinking of 1 Corinthians 15.
Talking about Leila to her siblings
PO: How did you help Ben with the process of the grief, and how have you spoken about Leila to Zach and Hannah as they’ve grown up? I realise that Hannah is still quite young, but I wonder if you could say something about that.
JG: Ben was three and a half when Leila died. In some ways, coming home to a three-and-a-half-year-old and having to continue to parent in those very hard days of grief was incredibly difficult. In other ways, it was—I mean, of course, he was an immense blessing, but to have care for a young child forced us to get up in the morning, get dressed and carry on with the day as much as we could.
Also, we had to try and find simple ways of explaining to him what had happened. Like most expecting parents, I had read those books you get from the library about becoming a big brother: the mum goes to the hospital, she’ll give birth, and then she’ll come home with the baby. Of course, our story didn’t end the way all those books told us.
I don’t know if we had been advised this, but I’m really thankful we were: we really did include Ben. We didn’t shut him out. He came to the hospital. He met his little sister. Our language in describing what had happened was that the Lord Jesus called Leila home to heaven, that she died, that she won’t come home to us, but one day, we’ll meet her in heaven. That was some of the language we had used.
I’ll give a little nod to my husband’s book, which is my favourite of his books: it’s a kids book that he wrote reflecting on conversations he had with Ben after Leila’s death. It’s called The Moon is Always Round and it’s a beautiful way for us to explain to him that God is always good, even when we can’t understand it—even in the darkness. In the same way that the moon is always round, even when we can only see a sliver or a half-moon or we can’t see it at all, that doesn’t change the fact that the moon is always round—that God is always good, even when we can’t understand it. So that was a beautiful way to explain to him God’s goodness in the midst of loss.
Then today, we have a five and a four-year-old. They know they have a big sister Leila—that they are behind her in the order of siblings. They talk about her pretty frequently. It’s such a gift to be able to point them to heaven in such a natural way—that they have a sister there already. So they have loads of questions, and I love it when they talk about their sister and then we get to talk about how we can have the hope of heaven.
Advice for those who want to help
PO: In terms of listeners who might not have experienced something similar, but want to help friends and church members who are going through this sort of thing, any words of wisdom in that regard?
JG: I would say the most painful thing that a person could do who’s close to someone who’s experienced this loss is to say and do nothing. Silence is much more painful than words that are clumsy, but you are trying and you move towards a grieving couple in love. I think some people are so afraid of saying the wrong thing that they say nothing. But trying to say something is better than saying nothing. That was more painful to us than those who maybe said the wrong thing.
For us, our loss was later term, so we had the privilege of knowing that Leila was a girl and the privilege of naming her, which I appreciate not everyone gets to do with early loss. It can be hard when you don’t know the gender. So when people use Leila’s name, that means a great deal. Writing it down. Certainly remembering anniversaries as life is extremely busy; there’s so much to remember. But it means a lot to us when people still remember Leila’s anniversary, even after coming up to eight years. So there are a few ideas.
We largely were so blessed by people after Leila’s death. So many people were in touch. So many people wrote us letters and sent flowers, and we really felt the body of Christ grieving with us.
Conclusion
PO: Excellent. Well, Jackie, thank you very much. The book is very powerful and very helpful. I’m sorry that you were in a position to be able to write it, but I’m very grateful that you did, and I’m very much looking forward to meeting Leila one day. Jackie, thank you very much.
JG: Thank you, Pete, for having me!
[Music]
PO: To benefit from more resources from the Centre for Christian Living, please visit ccl.moore.edu.au, where you’ll find a host of resources, including past podcast episodes, videos from our live events and articles published through the Centre. We’d love for you to subscribe to our podcast and for you to leave us a review so more people can discover our resources.
On our website, we also have an opportunity for you to make a tax deductible donation to support the ongoing work of the Centre.
We always benefit from receiving questions and feedback from our listeners, so if you’d like to get in touch, you can email us at ccl@moore.edu.au.
As always, I would like to thank Moore College for its support of the Centre for Christian Living, and to thank to my assistant, Karen Beilharz, for her work in editing and transcribing the episodes. The music for our podcast was generously provided by James West.
[Music]
Endnote
1 I Lilias Trotter, personal diary entry, 1 August 1901.
Photo by Aditya Romansa on Unsplash
