It was the winter of 1998 and my father was diagnosed with a brain tumor. I began to think he would leave this world without me ever knowing who he was really. That seemed profoundly sad to me. I wanted to do something about it. You know, who our parents were before we knew them, and the love story that carried us into the world remains a mystery to most of us. Who were those people in the old black and white photographs?

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My guest today is Don J. Snyder, author of Of Time and Memory: My Parents' Love Story [Random House, 2001]. Welcome to OpEdNews, Don.  

Joan Brunwasser: Of Time and Memory is about love but also about secrets, big ones. What compelled you to write this story?

Don Snyder: It was the winter of 1998 and my father was diagnosed with a brain tumor. I began to think he would leave this world without me ever knowing who he was really. I mean, the man he was beyond my father. From the time I was a little boy, I felt drawn to understand why he was always gazing off into space, why he seemed to belong to some other world far outside my world. He was just a mystery to me all my life. Then he got sick. I was 48 years old, perhaps feeling that I was nearing the end of my own youth. Time. Time seemed to be running out for us. I mean the time we'd shared, the time when we might have gotten to know each other was almost lost and gone. That seemed profoundly sad to me. I wanted to do something about it. You know, who our parents were before we knew them, and the love story that carried us into the world remains a mystery to most of us. Who were those people in the old black and white photographs?

JB: You discovered all kinds of things in your quest to draw closer to your father. Can you start us off, please? 

DS: Yes, of course it took some time but it came down to my father telling me that my mother, the only mother I had ever  known, was not my real mother. My real mother  was a girl he had been married to for nine months in 1950. And she died sixteen days after giving birth to me and my twin brother. Her name was Peggy. He was her first love and she was his. She was nineteen years old. We went together to her grave for the first time. Then I set out to learn their love story and to write a book about the time they had shared. I spent months tracking down everyone who had ever known her and him when they were young. All the people I spoke with told me they had been told that she died because her heart was not strong enough to bear twins.  My father told me the same thing.  So that was what I wrote in my book, Of Time and Memory which was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1999.  Soon after the book was published, I was on the Today Show talking about all that I had learned and written in the book. When I went back to my hotel room there was a call from home that a doctor had called me. This was Peggy's doctor. All he said to me was, "I read your book. You got it wrong."

JB: I'm sure that shook you up! So what did you do about it?

DS: I called the doctor and he refused to talk with me. He was very angry about the book. I called him once a week for several months and then I turned away. I had four little children to raise and to provide for. I wrote three more books and a movie. I just buried myself in that work. Of course, I was haunted by the thought that I had failed to write the whole truth in Of Time and Memory. My clothes never seemed to fit me again. I fell into a deep depression that lasted for years. I did my work on these other books and on the movie, but my heart wasn't in that work really.  I kept asking my father why Peggy's doctor would have told me that my book was wrong. My father didn't know. He didn't know anything.  

The years went by. And then, out of the blue, the doctor called me again and this time he was willing to tell me what had really happened to my mother, his patient, this nineteen year old girl.  He laid it out for me. He began with these words-- "I could have saved her life."   He had diagnosed her with preeclampsia in the fourth month. And he told her that if her condition worsened he would have to take her baby in order to save her life. She was furious with him. 

But in the sixth month when she was very sick, she returned to him and agreed to let him take her baby. He was just going to induce labor. Everyone in town would think she had miscarried. It was a Sunday morning. He was examining her with his stethoscope before the procedure and he heard two hearts beating. Not one. When he told her that she was carrying twins, she refused to let him continue. He said to me, "I sent her home to die. I knew that she would not make it."   She carried her babies to full term. He delivered her twins at three in the morning on August 11. Sixteen days later, she died. Right to the end, she believed she would pull through. And she made her doctor promise never to tell anyone what had transpired because she didn't want her twin sons to grow up knowing they had caused her death.  She didn't want her husband to know because she was afraid that he would not be able to be a good father if he knew that we had caused her death and that she had chosen us over him.   

It was 2007 when I finally knew the whole story. I began then to write a screenplay, a movie that would tell the whole story. I have worked on that screenplay ever since.  And on the last night of my father's life, I was alone with him for hours and I told him the whole truth so that he would finally know why he had lost this girl he loved. I was able to tell him before he left this world.

JB: How did knowing the true story help you? As a reader, it's difficult to digest. I can only imagine what it might have been like for you. Did it give you closure with your dad? 

DS: In a way, I felt like I had fulfilled my destiny as a son, to finally have learned how my mother died and to be able to tell my father so that he finally knew after fifty years. But still, my responsibility as a writer is to carry the whole story, the true story out into the world. And so, until the movie is finally made, I will not be at peace.

JB: What's happening with the movie? You undertook writing the screenplay, correct? Did you have any experience to do that?  It's not like writing a book, fiction or nonfiction, from what I understand.

DS: In 2001, Hallmark Hall Of Fame bought the film rights to my novel, Fallen Angel. I had never written a screenplay before but I insisted on writing that script so I could learn to one day write the script for my mother's movie.  I locked myself in my room for about seven months and studied all the great scripts. That was how I learned.  A screenplay in its finished form is around 100 pages. I wrote 3,762 pages before I finally finished my mother's script which I am calling  A Way Home.  Right now, it is with Joely Richardson who starred in my movie, Fallen Angel.  She has a 20 year old daughter who is just beginning her acting career and who would play Peggy. So I am hoping Joely and her daughter will "attach themselves" to my script so we can then seek the financing to make the movie independently.  

Because my mother died from preeclampsia, and because that condition is still the leading cause of death among pregnant women and their babies, I am committed to sharing profits from the movie with the University of Chicago Lying In Hospital's research center into preeclampsia.

In this way, my mother's movie might actually lead to a cure and this would change the world for women in a small but significant way.

JB: Wouldn't that be great? So, now you're on hold, so to speak, while the movie gets made and awareness is raised about preeclampsia. I know you've been writing in the meantime. But, how're you doing?  Are you out of your depression? 

DS: One of the wonderful things about a screenplay is that you can go back to work on it again and again, like knitting. You can crack it open and rewrite scenes in a few hours work without disturbing the whole. Unlike when you are writing a novel and it must be front and center in your life each day.  So I do this almost every day, I slip into my mother's screenplay and rewrite this or that. I am telling myself that this script will be a small masterpiece and that the movie will make a difference in this world.  But I am still haunted by my mother's story, by her sacrifice and by the fact that she was largely forgotten after she died in 1950.   In 2008, I went off to Scotland to learn to be a caddie when I was 58 years old. Part of this was to fulfill a promise I had made to my son, Jack, when he was a little boy-- I promised him if he ever became good enough at golf to make it to a pro tour, I would be his caddie.  Really, it was just a father wanting to walk beside his son for as long as he could. But when Jack got good, I decided to learn to be a caddie. So I went to St. Andrews, Scotland. It was an exile of sorts. I was telling myself that I needed to take a long walk.  I took my mother's screenplay with me of course and I worked on it every morning from 4am until 6:30. But when I went to work each day as a caddie, I had the chance to leave behind my story and to enter the story of a stranger. This felt like such a privilege to me. And I walked almost one thousand miles carrying golf clubs that season of 2008.  I worked the 187 day season without a single day off. And yes, gradually, the depression lifted because I was in the company of such wonderful characters-- the golfers I caddied for, but especially the Scottish boys who were my colleagues. Once they knew that I was there to learn from them so I could be of use to my son one day on his first pro tour, they embraced me. They held me up!

JB: I'm eager to talk about Walking with Jack, Don, which I loved. But, let's save that for later, if you don't mind. I'm wondering how you've dealt with what you learned about your mother. Ultimately, you and your brother are here because of the conscious choice that she made.  That must be a toughie for you. I'm particularly sensitive to this because many, many years ago, I had twins myself and literally didn't know it until  after the first one emerged. I can't imagine what I would have done if things had turned out differently. 

DS: There is no easy answer to this. I have the survivor's guilt of course because my mother gave up her life for me. It is made complicated by the fact that I became a writer.  As a writer, I have the responsibility to carry my mother's story as far as I can in this world. And as a son whenever I'm feeling haunted by my mother's death at age 19, I can turn back to my writing and write about it in the screenplay.  So the writing is both the illness and the cure, if you will. If I didn't have the script to work on, I might have just given up my life completely. 

JB: Does it help to have a twin with whom to share this newfound knowledge, this journey? 

DS: Yes, my brother has been very helpful. A kindred spirit. We are in this together.

JB: Has all of this made you two closer? Do you view it the same way?  

DS: Yes, we have grown closer. And yes, we view our mother's life and death in the same way.

JB: You write that your mother came to you in visions as you were growing up but you didn't know at the time that was who it was. Can you talk about that a bit? 

DS: I almost never talk about that because it instantly takes the story into the realm of make-believe. But it is something that happened to me as a small boy. I would awake in the night and there was this vision of this beautiful face in gold light.  I suffered convulsions as a small boy. They had to lay me down in a tub of ice cold water to stop them.  I later learned that in the last hour of my mother's life, she suffered a convulsion.  So, we were joined in this way. And who can say if the dead can return and visit us?  Maybe God only allows mothers who die in childbirth to return to visit this world, to get a glimpse of the babies they left behind. That would be nice, I think.  But you should also know that when I wrote Of Time and Memory, I heard my mother's voice in almost every sentence. It was like she was telling me what to write down.

JB: Wow. So, in a way, you were writing this book together, or at the very least, it was inspired and guided by your mother. That's lovely. How do you explain that it was only you and not your brother who heard and saw your mother? 

DS: I can't explain this. My brother and I have spoken about it and we just explain it by saying  one of us was put on this earth to write about my mother's sacrifice, and that was me, and so she showed herself to me in those visions. 

JB: As you learned about your mother, you also felt a special affinity with her because you were both moody and had moments of darkness. Was this bond a comfort to you? 

DS: When I finally learned about the darkness in my mother, then it explained a great many things to me. And I felt like her darkness and the darkness I felt was something holy that we shared.

JB: There's a very poignant anecdote in the book. One of the neighbors tells of seeing your mother up late, night after night, sewing. First, she sewed her bridesmaids' dresses, then her trousseau, then her married lady clothes and then, maternity and baby clothes. As young as she was and with all the many changes that transpired in a very short time, you were very real to her. 

DS: Yes, very real. And you have to remember that, for the final three months of her life, when she was sewing her baby clothes, she had been told by her doctor that she would not survive. I think she was able to keep going because she was so young and she didn't think she would ever die. Who believes at age nineteen that they are going to die? I think the remarkable thing is that she kept this from my father. He was an innocent.

JB: Your mother presented all of you with such a gift  - to your father so it wouldn't interfere with his ability to connect with you two, and for you two to live and feel unequivocally her love for you. How has what you've learned affected how you look at your own family - your wife and four children?

DS: My mother at age nineteen was wise enough to know that if her babies had to go through their lives knowing they had caused their mother's death, they might not have gotten along very well. She also knew that my father would not have been able to be a good father to these babies she was leaving him to care for if he knew they had caused her death. All of this has made me a person who feels privileged to have lived a whole life. Privileged to have shared a love story with Colleen for 30 years now. Privileged to have been a father to four children.  Privileged and grateful.  Knowing my mother's story has left me feeling privileged and grateful.  And that is a nice way to live along through one's days. You tend to stop asking for MORE all the time, and just to be grateful for all that you've been given.  I think, by the way, that this kind of gratitude is the secret to growing old with some grace.  However, I am still fighting to get my mother's movie made. That fight goes on.  You can be grateful without giving up.

JB: Indeed, you can. And your love and appreciation for your family come through very clearly in your writing. Thanks so much for talking with me. Before we wrap this up, is there anything you'd like to add?

DS: Yes, for everyone out there who wonders about the love story that carried them into this world-- their parent's love story-- ask them about it while you still can. Learn as much as you want to know about it. Because it will inform your life, meaning, it will define and shape your own love stories.  Thank you. 

JB: Thank you, Don.  I enjoyed this and am looking forward to the next installment in which we talk more about your latest book, Walking with Jack: A Father's Journey To Become His Son's Caddie [Doubleday, 2013]. 

DS: Very good, Joan. Same here.  

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Audio Interview with Rick Kogan, WGN Radio [Chicago], 10/15/2013

Authors Website: http://www.opednews.com/author/author79.html

Authors Bio:

Joan Brunwasser is a co-founder of Citizens for Election Reform (CER) which since 2005 existed for the sole purpose of raising the public awareness of the critical need for election reform. Our goal: to restore fair, accurate, transparent, secure elections where votes are cast in private and counted in public. Because the problems with electronic (computerized) voting systems include a lack of transparency and the ability to accurately check and authenticate the vote cast, these systems can alter election results and therefore are simply antithetical to democratic principles and functioning.



Since the pivotal 2004 Presidential election, Joan has come to see the connection between a broken election system, a dysfunctional, corporate media and a total lack of campaign finance reform. This has led her to enlarge the parameters of her writing to include interviews with whistle-blowers and articulate others who give a view quite different from that presented by the mainstream media. She also turns the spotlight on activists and ordinary folks who are striving to make a difference, to clean up and improve their corner of the world. By focusing on these intrepid individuals, she gives hope and inspiration to those who might otherwise be turned off and alienated. She also interviews people in the arts in all their variations - authors, journalists, filmmakers, actors, playwrights, and artists. Why? The bottom line: without art and inspiration, we lose one of the best parts of ourselves. And we're all in this together. If Joan can keep even one of her fellow citizens going another day, she considers her job well done.


When Joan hit one million page views, OEN Managing Editor, Meryl Ann Butler interviewed her, turning interviewer briefly into interviewee. Read the interview here.

While the news is often quite depressing, Joan nevertheless strives to maintain her mantra: "Grab life now in an exuberant embrace!"


Joan has been Election Integrity Editor for OpEdNews since December, 2005. Her articles also appear at Huffington Post, RepublicMedia.TV and Scoop.co.nz.