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Product Description
Don Snyder was sixteen days old when his mother died in a small Pennsylvania town in the summer of 1950. She was a girl of nineteen. In order to survive the heartbreak of her death, those who loved her best kept the memories of her hidden away, and Don grew up knowing nothing about her. Almost half a century later, with his father's health failing, Don set out to discover who his mother was and how she had loved his father, so that Don might return to his father now, at the end of his life, the unremembered love story from his youth. This book, which more than equals the power and the feeling of his much admired memoir, The Cliff Walk, is the story of his journey.
It is a journey that carried him deep into the lives of the people who had known his mother—her closest friends from high school, her childhood teachers, the elderly women who had been her bridesmaids. It brought him to the apartment she had shared with her adored young husband, to the hospital of his own birth, to the stunning secret of his mother's death—and ultimately it gave back to him the lost world, voice, and being of this young woman who had given him life.
Amazon.com Review
Sixteen days after author Don Snyder (The Cliff Walk) and his twin brother were born in 1950, their 19-year-old mother died. Her heartbroken husband, Richard, chose to never discuss her with his sons. But when Snyder, now in his late 40s, stumbles across a picture of his parents, he determines to excavate his mother's short existence as a gift for his father, who is dying from a brain tumor. This tender but terribly sad memoir is the result: the chronicle of smart, beautiful, but intensely private Peggy Schwartz, who wasn't as confident as she seemed, who felt completed by the love of a devout World War II veteran, who chose to carry her pregnancy to term and conceal her life-threatening toxemia from that beloved husband. As Snyder delves into his mother's life and death, he alternates between the love and rage that bring him closer to the man most deeply scarred by this youthful tragedy. The book's last scene, in which father and son sit together looking through Dick and Peggy Snyder's wedding album, is almost unbearably poignant. Yet there's also joy in the author's mystical belief that his quest has opened for him "the path back through stars and memory" that will one day reunite wife and husband, mother and sons. --Wendy Smith
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