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SALT LAKE CITY — Frances Beverly Johnson, wife of Thomas S. Monson, President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, passed away at 6:35 a.m. Friday morning in a Salt Lake City hospital. She was 85 years old.
Sis. Monson was born on Oct. 27, 1927. She grew up in Salt Lake City. She graduated from East High School and the University of Utah. While a student at the U, she and her friends were riding a streetcar and she was introduced to a young man named Tom Monson.
Francis Johnson married Thomas S. Monson in the Salt Lake Temple in October of 1948. She described the first time that her parents met him to an audience at a BYU women's conference. She joined the wives of the then first presidency and their daughters.
She said her father showed Thomas Monson a picture of a missionary named Monson and asked, "Do you know him?" Thomas Monson said, "Yes, that's my grandfather."
"My father was just thrilled," Frances Monson said. "He thought, oh we knew him. He was a missionary in our home in Sweden and helped convert my mother and father and 12 children. By that time he was in."
The three Monson children, Tom, Ann and Clark were all born in the 1950s.
"He could not do what he does without my mother's support," Ann Dibb, daughter of Thomas and Frances Monson, said. "And he knows that he has that support. And he's known that he's had that their whole married life.
"My mother's a fabulous listener," Dibb added. "And yet she'll come in periodically and give her viewpoints when he's talking to her. And so they're a wonderful team with one another. I maintain that Thomas Monson wouldn't be who he is without Frances."
Frances Monson had to share her husband first with the neighborhood as he was called to be a bishop at the age of 22. Then, with the world as they moved to Canada where he served as mission president at the age of 32, and then as an apostle at age 36.
Pres. Monson spent a great deal of time away from his family. Some of that time spent in East Germany, where the church built a temple in Freiburg in 1985. Sister Monson told a BYU audience that not long afterward she and Pres. Monson traveled to Germany to visit the Latter-day Saints.
"It was the most spiritual and most fantastic meeting I've ever attended," she said. "To see families reunited again after 40 years of being separated."
Pres. and Sis. Monson cared for and visited the sick and the elderly of all faiths for decades. In 1998, the Sisters of Charity honored the Monsons, who were at St. Joseph Villa often. Sis. Monson admired the adult day care, assisted living and long term facilities.
"And I think they should, people should really appreciate what they do," Sis. Monson said. "That is something that is absolutely necessary to have facilities like that. And they do a good job."
"I don't think God is too particular about the creeds of this person or that person, when it comes down to caring for the sick and comforting the lonely and giving them hope and a better life," Pres. Monson said. "I think the world of all with whom I've met at St. Joseph."
Pres. Monson's loving nature is most evident with his family, particularly with his devoted wife Frances, who had a serious fall in 2001.
"After mom was in that coma lying in the hospital for three weeks, dad conducted all his business from a waiting room in the hospital," Tom Monson, son of Thomas and Frances Monson, said. "And he sat up there hour after hour, day after day, prayerfully exerting faith that he could have his companion."
Sis. Frances Monson was by his side as he became President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, at temple dedications, for graduation exercises. They were always united in purpose and love for one another.
