On the main floor of April Simpkins’s South Carolina home is a small room decorated with memories of her daughter Cheslie Kryst.
It includes bold art prints that once hung in Kryst’s New York apartment; a faux cowhide rug that lay on her floor; an orange sofa that had the faint smell of her daughter’s perfume, where Simpkins slept when she came to the city to visit her.
“The first time I sat in that room, I couldn’t stop crying,” Simpkins, 56, says. “It was a space where I could bleed out my heart to her.” But these days, she says, “when I’m there, I smile a lot.”
Two years after losing her daughter Kryst, a correspondent on Extra and former Miss USA, to suicide at the age of 30, Simpkins has found a way to grieve with gratitude.
“It’s hard to push yourself into that place of, ‘I’m so thankful I had her for however many years,’ ” she says. “But when you do, it’s like raising the sun in a dark place. You remember things. You laugh at things.”
Now she’s opening up about her daughter’s life in a newly published book, By the Time You Read This: The Space Between Cheslie’s Smile and Mental Illness, written by Kryst, and finished after her death by Simpkins, in hopes of helping others wrestling with mental health issues.
For those who only knew Kryst as the radiant and brilliant beauty queen with degrees in law and business, or as the bubbly entertainment reporter on a red carpet, the news that she had died by suicide was incomprehensible.
But Simpkins understood the depths of her daughter’s long struggle with depression.
“I saw that side of her,” Simpkins says. “Others didn’t. It’s hard to see someone so full of life and wrap your head around the fact they could be suffering. But people choose what they want to share.”
When Kryst was growing up in North Carolina, the “high-achieving part was always there,” Simpkins says of her daughter, the second of four children from her first marriage to Rodney Kryst. (Simpkins also has two sons with husband David.)
“Everything had to be just so, and that was self-imposed,” she adds.
A guidance counselor in middle school cautioned that Kryst’s drive had the potential to burn her out, but in high school Kryst went on to become captain of the cheer squad and of the track team.
After graduating with honors from the University of South Carolina, she went to law school and got her MBA at the same time. “She didn’t slow down,” says Simpkins. “If you tried to talk to her, she’d say, ‘Don’t you think I can handle it?’ ”
Things did become too much to handle in 2015 when Kryst was a law student at Wake Forest University pursuing a double degree. That same year, she was competing for the title of Miss North Carolina: Kryst attempted suicide.
“I was blindsided,” Simpkins says. “I thought we could talk about anything, so when I got that phone call, I’m playing through conversations in my head, thinking ‘Why didn’t she feel comfortable enough to talk to me?'”
Afterward, Simpkins dedicated herself to supporting her daughter. “We talked five or six times a day,” she says. “And I had to learn not to talk at her, but to listen to her.”
And Simpkins prayed: “I pleaded with God for another chance. I asked God for more time with her. And I made the most of it.”
At the same time, Kryst continued to put pressure on herself to strive for more. In 2019, she was a civil litigation attorney, volunteering and doing pro bono work, but decided to compete in the Miss USA Pageant as well. When she won, she became the oldest woman at the time to secure the crown, at the age of 28.
It seemed from the outside like a dream come true. A few months after her win, Kryst was offered a job as a correspondent on Extra, where she was a natural on camera interviewing celebrities like Taylor Swift and Oprah Winfrey.
Throughout, she maintained her close relationship with her mom.
“We were so alike,” says Simpkins, adding, “We’d finish each other’s sentences.”
In December 2021, Kryst brought Simpkins with her to Israel, where she was working as a special correspondent for the Miss Universe pageant. The pair talked and laughed together until “tears streamed down our faces,” Simpkins recalls.
In early January 2022, Kryst joined her family for an annual trip to Universal Studios in Florida, beaming while posing with her siblings in snapshots.
But less than four weeks later, Kryst sent a devastating text to her mom that began, “By the time you get this, I won’t be alive anymore . . .” Kryst detailed the private pain she’d endured, writing, “I cannot bear the crushing weight of persistent sadness, hopelessness, and loneliness any longer…I cry almost every day now like I’m in mourning…I no longer feel like I have any purpose in life. I don’t know if I ever really did.”
When she first realized that Cheslie was gone, “I believed I would die from a broken heart,” Simpkins says. “Part of me felt like giving up.”
On social media, in the midst of her grief, she was attacked. “So many people would say, ‘How could the two of you be best friends and you not know?’; Or ‘How could you not save her?’ It was coming at me hard,” she says.
But Simpkins says, “This was a battle Cheslie had been fighting for years. There isn’t anyone to blame. It just is.”
As a mother, “you want to fight every battle and you want your children to know, ‘I got your back,'” she says. “But mental illness is a fight you can’t fight for your child. You have to learn how to equip them with the tools so that they can continue to go nine rounds. And that’s hard. Watching someone with a mental illness is hard.”
As agonizing as the loss still is, Simpkins refuses to live with “what-ifs.”
“I lived every single day with her to its fullest,” she says. “I can’t let guilt erase what we had. I’m just thankful for all the days Cheslie fought and won and lived to fight another day. You have to accept what was. You can’t change it. And what’s left is gratitude.”
In her final note, Kryst left her mom a vital task: to publish the memoir she’d been working on.
“I knew that I had to get this done,” Simpkins says. “Doing this thing that was so important to her, it was a phenomenal feeling. When it was finished, it was the first time I saw the sun and could exhale.”
In her part of the book, “I needed to add a few puzzle pieces she didn’t add, and to talk about those of us who are left behind,” says Simpkins, who has become a mental health advocate and an ambassador for the National Alliance on Mental Health.
“I knew that I was not alone. And that there are other people who felt what I was feeling and could relate, and I thought maybe this could help them with their mental health.”
Simpkin has also helped establish the Cheslie C. Kryst Foundation, and proceeds from book sales will go toward the foundation’s work supporting mental health programs for youth and young adults.
“In Cheslie’s passing, I found my purpose,” Simpkins says. “I hope others in the midst of pain will find a purpose and passion and not feel their life has ended because someone they love more than life itself is gone.”
