Jill Duggar and her husband, Derick Dillard, are recalling the memorial service they planned in honor of their late daughter, Isla Marie.
“We planned a funeral because that was something that we really wanted,” Jill, 34, said on the Wednesday, March 11, episode of her sister Jinger Duggar’s eponymous podcast with husband Jeremy Vuolo. “I think anybody at any stage of pregnancy, you can minimize it [and] you can say, ‘Oh, you’re only this many weeks [or] that many weeks.’”
She continued, “It doesn’t matter, like, whatever you feel is going to remember your baby and remember their life in a significant way.”
Jill and Dillard, 37, announced in an April 2024 social media statement that their daughter “died in utero” one month earlier.
“At some point in the pregnancy, there’s mandated state laws that you have to bury the baby a certain way or whatever,” Jill, a mom of three sons, said on the podcast episode. “It was really helpful for us and for me that we do as much as the grieving in a tangible way as possible.”
Jill pointed out that she had previously watched her mom, Michelle Duggar, and several of her sisters “grieve” after their respective pregnancy losses. (Michelle, 59, suffered a miscarriage in 2011 with her and husband Jim Bob Duggar’s 20th baby, years before several of her daughters experienced their own losses.)
“I had seen other people, so I was able to incorporate some of those experiences and, thankfully, have more knowledge and more resources at my fingertips,” Jill said. “I reached out to my friends — everybody from a nurse friend at the hospital who was there to help me, which was amazing. I’m so thankful for her.”
One of Jill’s friends volunteers with Holy Sews, an organization that provides premature-sized clothes for infant funerals, and provided an outfit for Isla’s service.
“She went above and beyond. She monogrammed our little blanket,” Jill recalled. “The hospital had things, like poppy plates and my friend had a little box she gave us, and then books. That was another way that I processed.”
Jill further found solace in “doing things together” as a family.
“We went to the cemetery that we buried Isla at,” she noted. “Most cemeteries have a baby area, which a lot of time they will offer regardless of the gestation [time if] it’s a year and under. … All you have to pay is the opening and closing ground costs and buy your own vault.”
According to the Counting On alum, she was “a train wreck” returning home from the hospital without her baby. Holding a burial service helped bring her comfort.
“It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced before [of] this sense of loss and detachment from this piece of you that you really want to hold,” Jill tearfully said. “The sense that I had was, like, the closest feeling that I could feel to having lost my child somewhere, and I couldn’t find them and wanting them to come home. … Almost, like, inconsolable, but I knew I was resting in Christ and I knew that he promised to carry us through.”
