One woman's inspirational tale about expressing joy amid
loss and suffering.
To Climb a Distant
Mountain:
A Daughter’s Tribute to Her Diabetic Mother
by Laurisa White Reyes
Genre: Historical True Memoir
In 1974, at the age of twenty-six, Cynthia Ball White was
diagnosed with Juvenile Diabetes. Today, it is estimated that 1.25 million
Americans suffer from what is now referred to as Type I diabetes, compared to
38 million who have Type 2 (adult onset) diabetes. It is a merciless disease
that often leads to blindness, neuropathy, amputations, and a host of other
ailments, including a shortened life span.
Despite battling diabetes for forty-five years, Cyndi beat
the odds. Not only did she outlive the average Type I diabetic, but until her
last week of life in 2021, she had all her “parts intact”. Her daughter often
called her a walking miracle. But more impressive was Cyndi’s positive outlook
on life, even in the midst of tremendous loss and suffering.
The author hopes that in sharing Cyndi’s story, others may
be inspired to face their own struggles with the same faith, courage, and joy
as her mother did.
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I’m
going to tell you about my mother. Yes, that is the story I will tell. No other
story really matters. I know that now. Funny, how you can spend a lifetime
conjuring up magical tales of dragons and enchanters and heroes who will never
exist except in your own head and on sheets of paper, when the stories that
matter most happen every day all around us. I’ve spent most of my life making
up stories. It’s what I do. But now that Mom is gone, I have no stories left.
At least none that I care about more than hers.
My first distinct memory of my mother (I was five or six) was
in the hospital. I’d come to know that hospital well. It’s in Panorama City,
half an hour from where I live now, half an hour from where I lived then, two
different cities—two points on the circumference of a circle with the hospital
at its center. It’s where all five of my children were born, where my youngest
brother was born—and died. It’s where Mom would spend too much of her life. But
not yet. That would come later.
I remember the elevator doors opening and Dad pushing Mom out
in a wheelchair. She wore a yellow robe that a friend had bought her when she
got sick. She had crocheted me a hat. It was yellow too, criss-crossed strands
like a spider’s web, with a green band. She gave it to me there. I wore
it often as a child. Somewhere, I have a picture of me wearing it. The hat is
in my mother’s hope chest now, the one she passed on to me when I got married.
Been in there for years. Decades. It’s still a treasure.
I remember her disappearing back inside the elevator, waving,
the doors sliding shut, swallowing her. I still feel sick, tight and hollow
inside, when I think of that memory.
In the weeks leading up to that hospital stay, which would be
the first of dozens, she’d been sick. She’d lost weight and
felt very ill. She thought she was dying of cancer, but she postponed seeing a
doctor because she had recently enrolled in Kaiser Permanente medical insurance
through Dad’s employer, and she thought they had to wait for their membership
cards to come in the mail. By the time she walked into the ER, she was on death’s
door.
Her doctor smelled her breath, which Mom thought was an odd
thing to do. And then he called in other doctors to smell her breath. It
smelled sweet, like decaying fruit. Mom was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes,
which they used to call Juvenile Diabetes. It meant that her pancreas had
completely malfunctioned, and she would be insulin-dependent the rest of her
life. She learned how to give herself insulin by injecting oranges. She was
twenty-six years old.
Mom actually felt relieved because it wasn’t
cancer. There was no way to know then what diabetes would do to her, how it
would shape not only her life but the lives of her husband and children and
grandchildren, how it would gradually destroy her body a little at a time until
it finally robbed her of life itself.
Last Summer in
Algonac
by Laurisa White Reyes
Genre: Fictionalized Family Biography
From the Spark
Award-winning author of The Storytellers & Petals...
The summer of 1938 is idyllic for fourteen-year-old Dorothy
Ann Reid. She’s spent every summer of her life visiting her grandparent’s home
on the banks of the St. Clair River in Algonac, Michigan. But unbeknownst to
her, this will be her last. As Dorothy and her family pass their time swimming,
fishing, and boating, they are blissfully unaware that tragedy lurks just
around the corner.
Last Summer in Algonac is a fictionalized account of the author’s grandmother
and her family’s final summer before her father’s suicide, which altered their
lives forever. Inspired by real people and events, Laurisa Reyes has woven
threads of truth with imagination, creating a “what if” tale. No one living
today knows the details leading to Bertram Reid’s death, but thanks to decades
of letters, personal interviews, historical research, and a visit to Algonac,
Reyes attempts to resolve unanswered questions, and provide solace and closure
to the Reid family at last.
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That last
summer in Algonac, there was little water play for Father, who was now
fifty-seven. Alberta, who had married less than two years earlier and had
recently given birth to her first child, had opted to stay in Cleveland. She
and Charles had been my grandest playmates while I was growing up, but now they
both had new adult lives and families of their own. Even Charles, who was
eleven years my senior (Alberta fourteen years), would prove too occupied with his
wife Alice and their baby to venture into any games with me. I supposed Father
might have played that role with me when I was young, but I was thirteen now,
practically a woman, and neither he nor I dared suggest something so childish
as to jump into the river for a splash—except for that one last wonderful
afternoon.
Looking back, I
wish that I had done it every day—that I had taken his hand and walked with him
along the bank under the trees, or sat in the grass and taken off our shoes,
letting our feet dangle in the chilled, meandering water. I wish that I had had
the courage to ask him more about that old rowboat, whether he had ever taken
it all the way across the river to Ontario, Canada, where he and his family had
come from originally. I would have liked to have been in that boat with him
rowing, his muscles taut under his shirt, his sleeves rolled to the elbow.
We wouldn’t
have talked much. Father was a man of few words. But I would have listened to
the ripples of the St. Clair lapping against the boat, the gentle cut of the
oars through the water, the calls of birds overhead. It would have been enough
just to be with him, to see his face turned to the sun, the light glinting off
his spectacles, and to have seen traces of a smile on his lips.
1939, the year
Father died, was a big year for America. It was the year the World’s
Fair opened in New York, and the first shots of World War II were fired in
Poland. The Wizard of Oz premiered at Groman’s
Chinese Theater in Hollywood, California, and Lou Gehrig gave his final speech
in Yankee Stadium. Theodore Roosevelt had his head dedicated on Mt. Rushmore,
and John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath. All in all, it was a monumental year,
one I would have liked to have shared with my father. He did live long enough
for Amelia Earhart to be officially declared dead after she disappeared over
the Atlantic nearly two years earlier, but otherwise, he missed the rest of it.
No child should
have to mourn a parent. And if she does, at least things about it should be
clear. Unanswered questions that plague one for the rest of one’s
life shouldn’t be part of the picture.
Death is
normally simple, isn’t it? Someone has a heart attack,
or dies in a car accident, or passes away in their sleep from old age. Everyone
expects to die sometime, and they wonder how it will happen and why. And when
it does, as sad as it is for those left behind, the wonder is laid to rest.
Most of the
time.
1939 was a
blur. I’d prefer to forget it, quite frankly. But 1938 was worth
remembering, especially that summer we spent in Algonac with Grandmother Reid
and the family. As long as I could remember, we’d spent every summer on the
banks of the St. Clair. As it turned out, it would be my final summer in
Algonac. Our last summer together. Of course, I didn’t know it at the time, and
I’m glad. If I could have seen seven months into the future, if I had known
then how the world as I knew it would all come crashing down, it would have
spoiled everything.
Laurisa White Reyes is
the author of twenty-one books, including the SCBWI Spark Award-winning
novel The Storytellers and the Spark Honor recipient Petals.
She is also the Senior Editor at Skyrocket Press and an English instructor at
College of the Canyons in Southern California. Her next release, a non-fiction
book on the Old Testament, will be released in August 2026 with Cedar Fort
Publishing.
