By Lyndia Grant
(Source: The Informer)
My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. — Hosea 4:6
This is an abbreviated series, which began 22 years ago. Because there are so many new readers who pick up The Washington Informer each year, I feel it is my duty to write this series every year in November, for National Diabetes Month. The original article was taken from an online publication written by me back in 2003, only months after the death of my mother, Rev. Fannie Estelle Hill Grant. Since its publication, the original article has made its way around the world. It is posted in Africa, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Canada, Europe and Asia, it has been translated into different languages, and it appears all across America. Allow me to share the story of my mother again.
Last time this series was published, many people anxiously awaited the next issue. It is a story of the life and suffering of my mother, written to share with Black readers, in order to help somebody along the way, so her living would not be in vain. That was my mother’s motto!
This week, the Lord told me to share this article with readers again. Those of you who have read this column faithfully will be able to witness the devastation faced by me and my family, as my mother suffered for 12 years with Type 2 diabetes and all of the other implications it brings to the human body. Here is my story:
It is my pleasure to run this series after publishing it more than 10 times. It is about my own public relations campaign for education on diabetes prevention, established under the name of my mother, Fannie Estelle Hill Grant, and started after her death from Type 2 diabetes on Christmas Day in 2000. Yep, she died on Christmas Day, and it took me and my family years to begin celebrating again. For us, it was the saddest day, until about 10 years later, when I had the bright idea to just hang crystal angels all over my Christmas tree. Aha! My Christmas angels, in memory of my mother. It worked. Back to my story.
I noticed a fire burning in the diabetes health arena, particularly in the African American community, which is still burning out of control. Hopefully, this campaign will slow down this problem. Let us stop fanning the flames and put out the fire.
Mother Grant was 73 years old, a wife and mother of nine. A homemaker who loved her family very much, she prepared wonderful homemade meals for the family — including desserts like cakes, peach cobblers and sweet potato pies — and one of her special dishes that I enjoyed was chicken and dumplings. Any day of the week, our mother enjoyed cooking and cleaning, and I mean very clean! She kept the clothes clean for her family, and although she raised nine children of her own, she always had room for other needy children.
In our early years in the 1960s, Mother was the wife of our sharecropper father in North Carolina, but they moved the family to Washington, D.C., in 1965. For more than 30 years, the Washington metropolitan area was home until she moved back to her family farm.
Our family learned of Mother’s Type 2 diabetes after she had a major stroke in 1989. She lived only 12 years after the diagnosis. It was during that time when we watched her health go downhill that God spoke into my spirit, telling me to look deeply into this Type 2 diabetes illness, find out the causes and symptoms, then share those with the world. I pledged to begin the educational prevention campaign while we visited with and cared for our mother during her last year of life.
Mother and Father moved back to North Carolina, where she enjoyed her later years in a very peaceful way. We purchased her a new home, took over the mortgage, and she was happy. Mother Grant enjoyed living on the 226-acre farm near Kinston. She was one of the heirs to the vast farm left to her family by her father, my grandfather Floyd Hill. She enjoyed walking around the farm, following my father as he worked.
Mother suffered many additional strokes; during one of them, she lost the use of her tongue and couldn’t speak. Her kidneys failed, and she had kidney dialysis for the last two years of her life. She also had high blood pressure for many years, and both of her legs were amputated above her knees.
We wanted to know more about the disease that took our mother in such a brutal fashion. There was so much pain and suffering prior to her death. Mother Grant was a Christian, and she was an evangelist who preached the gospel in churches throughout the Washington area, where everyone loved her and called her Ma.
As her oldest daughter, I promised to educate millions of people regarding the causes and prevention of Type 2 diabetes. In sharing with the general public, I feel a lot better now, because my mother’s living shall not be in vain. Read Part 2, “The Problem,” next week in this miniseries to learn how to make a lifestyle change to change your HbA1c.
