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.
Amazon * B&N * Bookbub * Goodreads
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.
Amazon * B&N * Bookbub * Goodreads
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.
Website * Facebook * Bookbub * Amazon * Goodreads
Question: Most of your books are fiction. What prompted you to write a memoir?
Answer: My interest in family stories really began when I was in high school, when I was interviewing my grandmother for a school project. She mentioned, almost in passing, that her father had committed suicide when she was just fourteen years old. Few people in my family knew about it, and no one ever discussed it. I spent the next thirty years researching that side of my family and his story, especially. The result was a novel, Last Summer in Algonac, based on that pivotal event in my grandmother’s life. Then, when my mother died in 2021, I decided to tell her story too.
Q: How did you choose the title, To Climb a Distant Mountain?
A: Since the time Mom was very young, she dreamed of being an explorer. Her heroes included Dr. David Livingston, John Goddard, Marco Polo, among others. She longed to see the world and leave her mark on it. But other than traveling to a few countries after she and my father retired, she never had the chance to live her dream. She married young, became the mother to four children, and then was diagnosed with Type I Diabetes, a horrible chronic illness that destroyed her body over a lifetime. Her dreams were like seeing a mountain peak in the distance and never feeling any closer to it. Instead, she read about great adventures and called herself an armchair traveller.
Q: How important is family history to you now?
A: I’ve always loved researching my ancestors, but now that I’m older and all my children are grown, I see the value in leaving a legacy for them and their future children. Linking generations together through storytelling and photographs, when available, is essential to helping children and youth learn to respect and appreciate those who came before them, who sacrificed so much so they can enjoy the privileges and blessing they have today. My youngest son has been researching his father’s family and organizing a photo album of relatives and ancestors from Guatemala. My husband moved to the United States when he was 15, leaving everything behind. He and I made sure our kids understand their heritage, both his and mine.
Q: Reading your books makes telling these stories look so easy, but not everyone can write entire novels about their families.
A: You don’t have to be a professional writer to preserve family stories. Journals and diaries, letters, recorded interviews, newspaper clippings, it doesn’t have to be fancy. Last Summer in Algonac began with me asking my grandmother questions about her childhood and recording her answers. I transcribed that conversation in a spiral notebook, which I still have. A lot of what I learned about her father actually came from a newspaper obituary a relative found and gave to me. To Climb a Distant Mountain includes many of my father’s and my journal entries and excerpts from things my mother wrote down about her life.
A: What do you recommend for someone interested in writing about their own family history?
Q: Start with something simple. Buy a notebook, or open a new document on your computer, or just start asking a relative questions and record it on your phone. Record your own memories, one at a time, and upload them to Ancestry.com or Family Search, which allow you to share information with family members. My one caveat is don’t wait. Start today. If you wait until tomorrow, it might be too late.
Follow the tour HERE for special content and a giveaway!
Feb 12
Kickoff at Silver Dagger Book Tours
Feb 13
Feb 14
Feb 15
Feb 16
Karen J Mossman – World of Stories
Feb 17
Book Reviews by the Reluctant Retiree
☼ A Place In The Spotlight ☼ with M.C.V. EGAN
Feb 18
Feb 19
Books all things paranormal and romance
Feb 20
Feb 21
Feb 22
Stormy Nights, Books and Blogging
Feb 23
Feb 24
Feb 25
Tina Donahue Books – Heat with Heart
Feb 26
Memoirs are interesting to read. Thanks for the chance
Looks very exciting Do you write in a daily journal?
Hi everyone! Thank you so much for stopping by. To answer some of your questions, I do in fact keep an almost daily journal which I started at the age of 14. I am now 57. My dad also has kept a diary for decades. The bulk of the memoir came from those records.
Carol G. I'm so sorry for your loss. Diabetes is such a horrible disease. We have been following the advancements of potential pancreas transplants, but it did not happen in time to help my mom. We can only continue to support research for the next generation. :)
The book details are captivating.
This sounds like an exciting read and I like the cover too.
This sounds very interesting. It is not my normal type book but I would be willing to give it a try!
Sounds wonderful.
this sounds wonderful, great cover too
This sounds like an inspiring Memoir! I like the excerpt and cover.
It is so good to hear about a person who makes it through juvenile diabetes in the way your mother did. My family has a long history of adult onset, but my younger sister was diagnosed with DM1 at 16. Unfortunately, she did not make it through virtually unscathed, and died much too young. That is one of the reasons that the advances in treatment of the disease are bittersweet to me, since who knows if she could have been helped by them.
Carol G. I'm so sorry for your loss. Diabetes is such a horrible disease. We have been following the advancements of potential pancreas transplants, but it did not happen in time to help my mom. We can only continue to support research for the next generation. :)
It sounds like an interesting read.
I love the covers and the excerpts.
Sounds exciting.
The cover is beautiful and it sounds like an interesting memoir.