OF TIME AND MEMORY – MY PARENTS’ LOVE STORY by Don J. Snyder, Ballantine, 1999, 304 pages, $14.

This is a remarkable memoir by a Maine writer – it’s the story of the mother he never knew, a mother who died 16 days after he was born.

As the Scarborough writer tells us in a foreword, “The journey of this book, which ends in the Lutheran Cemetery in Hatfield, Pa., began with a photograph that my father sent me at Christmas 1997. It was an old black-and-white picture of a bride and groom in the backseat of their honeymoon car, a picture which evoked a time just after World War II and carried with it a high sense of promise in the faces of the young husband and his beautiful bride, who wore a garland of flowers in her hair.”

Growing up, he knew only that his mother’s name was Peggy. “I didn’t know that she was just 19 years old when she died, or that she lived only 16 days after she gave birth to me and my twin brother in August of 1950.”

Snyder tells us that he began a search for his mother’s life as a gift to his father, who was “in the last years of his life” from a brain tumor. So began a series of days in which he drove to Hatfield, Pa., where Peggy grew up and was married, and where gradually he put her life together, piece by piece, remembrance by remembrance.

His father, he writes, was now “an old man who, in order to survive the terrible pain of his broken love story, had made himself forget how greatly he had been loved.” Snyder vowed to “give all that back to him now” in this book.

The accomplished Maine author says that the writing of this book “was the first effortless writing I had ever done in my life.” And the writing is luminescent, almost like a father telling a long-forgotten story to a small child cuddling in his lap. “What I have learned from all of this is nothing less than the mystery of love,” Snyder writes.

Because Peggy’s death at such a young age was the “saddest thing people in Hatfield could remember, no one had forgotten her.” That enabled Snyder to build a story of her life from the recollections of those who knew her – and he found many – and many had sharp, clear remembrances of the pretty young woman.

He found a girl “who worked with Peggy at the telephone company [and] had no difficulty remembering how Peggy described her first date.” So, Snyder laid down the events in his mother’s life along a time line.

He writes of the people he met, such as Muriel, Peggy’s aunt, who said to him: “Let me tell you who your mother was in this world.”

Early in the memoir, Snyder tells us, “We are living at a time now when we want to know what is true. In the stories that we read, we want to know what actually happened and what we invented. … But in this story of mine, invention was not good enough for me. I had no wish to invent my mother, but to reinstate her.”

And as he proceeds back along the time line of her life, Snyder tells of dreams in which Peggy comes to him. Then there is the time, early on, when he decides the book may be too painful for his father and surviving relatives. His wife, Colleen, sets him straight:

“If anything happened to me, I wouldn’t want our children to just forget me because it was too sad to remember. And this isn’t just about your mother’s love story with your father. It’s about your love story with her. The story that’s been missing for so long. I think you have a duty to find her story. Even if it makes everybody on earth sad. She never had the chance to tell her story to anyone.”

Alternately recounting his search for his mother’s life with a retelling of the scenes he has drawn from his talks with people who knew Peggy, Snyder puts together a striking picture of a lovely, private, young woman and the young man she married and loved.

The Scarborough teacher and writer has an exceptionally lucid writing style as he recounts the story of her life and theirs, and of his search for her. What is especially remarkable are the insights he was able to gain that enabled him to give us a rare picture of this caring, “intensely private” person who bore twins knowing she very probably would not live to see them grow up, and how she gave his father, unknowingly, the courage to go on and raise his sons.

What is remarkable, too, is the number of people he was able to find who had such sharp, clear recollections of a person and events from 50 years ago. It is further testimonial to the love and faith of the young woman who shared only 16 days of Snyder’s early life.

This book is overflowing with emotion and you will not have dry eyes by its finish. It is a beautiful memoir.