Of Time and Memory: A Mother's Story [signed] [first edition]

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.