When Barb Higgins spotted the billboard with her face on it for the first time, it was July and she was driving through midtown Manhattan with her husband Ken, daughter Gracie and one-year-old son Jack, on their way home to Concord from Florida. Higgins said they put on their hazard lights and pulled over to take a picture of the billboard, which took up half the side of a 23-story Eighth Avenue office building.

“We turned left onto Eighth Avenue and I’m like, ‘there I am!’” Higgins recalled. “It was a huge building. And Jack said ‘mama!’ seeing the building.”

When a police officer came over to ask them to move their car, he recognized her from the picture.

The advertisement depicts Higgins standing on a mountaintop amid a desert landscape, with baby Jack in a carrier on her back.

“I beat three brain tumors. At 57, I gave birth again,” the advertisement reads. “Every day is a day to rise.”

Concord School Board member Barb Higgins has been appearing larger than life on buildings in New York City for the past several months, as part of an ad campaign for Montefiore Medical Center.

For Higgins, participating in the ad campaign was a way to lend her support to the hospital that helped her and also to share her personal story of tragedy and hope with the world. In 2016, Higgins lost her daughter Molly, who died suddenly of an undetected brain tumor. In 2018, when she was beginning to think about having another baby, Higgins traveled to Montefiore Medical Center to seek a solution for her painful chronic nerve condition. Doctors ordered an MRI and discovered that Higgins had three brain tumors of her own. She received surgery and radiation treatment at Montefiore, which led to her recovery from both the tumors and the nerve condition.

“They were really, really good to me,” Higgins said. “They treated us in a way I’ve never been treated by the medical profession, and that’s not lost on me. To me, it was a huge honor to do it.”

In 2021, after completing a cycle of IVF treatment, which was not done at Montefiore, Higgins successfully gave birth to Jack, her third child, at age 57, becoming the oldest person in New Hampshire to give birth.

“To me, this ad and all that it stands for is just knowing that no matter how bad your day is, there’s going to be a better day tomorrow,” Higgins said. “It’s just talking about being sad and creating life and finding happiness again.”

The ad campaign consists of a video commercial, an article on the Montefiore website and billboard advertisements that have been posted around New York.

In April, Montefiore flew Higgins and her family out to Moab, Utah, twice in March and April to shoot the commercial, which was directed by Dennie Gordon, who has directed episodes of The Office, 30 Rock and Dawson’s Creek. Higgins said when the crew first brought her to the location it was the middle of the night and still dark outside. As the sun rose, Higgins realized she was sitting on a cliff overlooking a beautiful canyon.

“They said, ‘just think about Molly, think about whatever, and whatever emotions you have on your face are fine,’ ” Higgins said. “I had not seen where I was at all, so a lot of my expressions were pretty easy to come by. I was just like ‘holy crap, we’re in the middle of a canyon.’ ”

It’s not the first time she has been in an ad for the medical center. In 2019, after she was cured of brain tumors, the company came to Concord to photograph her at the Capitol Center for the Arts and film her working out at the gym.

While she has received some critical comments from people online about her choice to have a baby later in life, Higgins said she’s mostly gotten an overwhelming amount of positive feedback from people nationwide. She has had people come up to her on the street who recognize her from the TV commercial. She says “scores” of women have reached out to her in recent months to ask about her IVF experience, and to share stories of their own fertility journeys.

Higgins said it feels good to be able to share her story with the world, especially since it allows her to talk about Molly.

“I can’t tell the story of Jack without talking about Molly, and so her legacy and what she stood for also gets shared as part of the story,” Higgins said. “She might not be on the Billboard but let me tell you, her energy is on the billboard.”

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