A Short Story
Don Snyder is a well-published novelist and memoirist with a story that strikes close to Every Mother Counts’ heart.
Don wrote this as a letter to Christy. It’s origin goes back quite a few years, but the story is as relevant today as ever. Now’s your chance to read Don and his parent’s story before it becomes the next blockbuster film.
Now that my four children have finished college I am preparing to devote the rest of my time to finding the cause and cure of preeclampsia. I have just connected with the Preeclampsia Foundation for this purpose. I’ve been a writer all my life. My tenth book has just been published by Doubleday, and I wrote the 2003 Hallmark Hall Of Fame Christmas movie, “Fallen Angel.” All of this work across all of the years, I see now, was merely a preparation to tell one true story in a movie I plan to make. It is a movie I would like to speak with you about. In many ways it begins in Chicago in 1998. I was on Oprah’s stage to talk about a book of mine that had just been published in New York, but really I was most eager to talk with Oprah about another book I had not yet finished.
The next year when Oprah began an enterprise of producing “Book Videos” to try to do for books what videos had done for music, she chose my new book as one of her first projects. Of Time & Memory had just been published by Alfred A. Knopf in New York. It told the story of my mother, a nineteen year old girl who died and was forgotten in a small town in Pennsylvania in 1950. All my life I had never been told anything about her. I hadn’t known that she was my father’s first love and he was hers. And that she got pregnant on their honeymoon and then died nine months later, sixteen days after giving birth to my twin brother and me.
As I was researching the book the only thing that remained of my mother’s medical records was a single index card with the name of her physician and these words — “Twins at full term. Eclampsia.”
When I found my mother’s physician, Dr. Clinton Toewe, he denied that she had ever been his patient. I stood at his front door with the index card in my pocket and he just closed the door.
I had no idea why he would lie to me, but I excused him in the book, assuming that he was still standing on some patient-doctor privilege.
A few months after the book was published I was on the Today Show in New York telling my mother’s story. When I returned to my hotel room I received a call from home with word that the doctor had called me there. We spoke for only a moment, and all he said to me was: “I read your book. You got it wrong.”
I was haunted by this. I tried for years to persuade him to talk with me. Finally before his death he told me the truth.
In the third month of her pregnancy, my mother left her family physician, Dr. Paul Moyer, because she was not feeling well, and went to see Dr. Toewe who was the only obstetrician in that part of rural Pennsylvania. He diagnosed her with preeclampsia and when he told her that if her condition worsened the only way he could save her life was to take her baby, she refused to see him again.
Then in the sixth month of her pregnancy when she became very scared and weak as her kidneys were failing she returned to him and he secretly made plans to induce labor and take the baby, to save her life.
The doctor scheduled the procedure for a Sunday morning when he knew the whole town would be in church. My mother went alone to his office, barefoot because her feet were too swollen for even her husband’s shoes to fit. Dr. Toewe was conducting a routine exam before the procedure and when he heard through his stethoscope two hearts beating in her uterus, two babies instead of one, my mother wouldn’t go through with the procedure.
She spent the last three months of her pregnancy, sewing her baby clothes and preparing to die. Too uncomfortable to sleep, she often stayed up all night sewing at the window in her bedroom. Neighbors remember that the little lamp on the Singer sewing machine was often the only light still on in the town. They told me how soon after her babies were born the light went out forever.
In the weeks after her death my father slept every night on her grave. His army buddies took turns picking him up each morning, taking him to the coffee shop on Main Street to sit and talk to him.
Dr. Toewe told me that my mother never wanted anyone to know the truth. She made him promise to keep his secret so that my brother and I would not have to go through our lives knowing we had caused her death.
“I never told your poor father either,” he told me. “Your mother was afraid he would not be able to be a good father to you if he knew that you had caused him to lose her.”
The doctor never broke his promise to my mother. He kept his silence even when he was blamed in the town for Peggy’s death.
Finally I began to understand, and I did the only thing I could to try to set the record straight. I locked myself in a room for two years and taught myself to write screenplays so that one day I could write the movie that would tell the complete story.
This became my life’s work. Eleven years ago I wrote the Hallmark Hall Of Fame Christmas movie, “Fallen Angel,” as a practice script. We were filming in Northern Ontario, and when I met Gary Sinise who starred in the movie, the first thing I said to him was, “Our lives have intersected because of a nineteen year old girl who died a long time ago.” I promised Gary that I would have the screenplay finished in a year.
But it wasn’t until the winter of 2010 when I wrote the ending while I sat beside my father on the last night of his life. From Midnight until just after dawn, it was only the hospice nurse and me in the room with him, as I read the script aloud to him hour after hour and finally told him why Peggy had died. I held his hand and told him that he had been a good father.
For the sixty years I knew my Dad he was always a little lost. A little confused and uncertain. But all of that seemed to end when the bugler from the Army Color Guard played Taps and I laid his body down beside Peggy’s in the Lutheran Cemetery, in the rectangle of earth that had been waiting for him since she was buried there in August of 1950, under the headstone they had shared and that was engraved with his name beside hers when he lost her. She was his nineteen year old bride when he buried her, and he was just a kid. Now he was an old man being carried back to her by her twin boys who were turning into old men themselves. He was no longer lost in the wide world. I stood there remembering the stories people had told me about him and my mother. His old friends didn’t believe that he would ever get over Peggy’s death. And in many ways he never did. I thought of my mother’s body at age nineteen, her breasts swollen with milk for her babies just a few blocks away. A stranger at the funeral parlor turning her naked arms and legs to dress her in her wedding dress for the wake. Her beautiful, young body without a mark, laid in the ground alongside the young boys from her high school whose bodies were torn apart in the war and then sent back home from Europe and the Pacific to be buried with her. I wondered if my young mother ever came to the cemetery and stood at the graves of those boys before her own death.
My Dad’s two sisters had stood on either side of him when they buried Peggy on August 30, 1950. Jean was twenty years old. Ruthie was eighteen. They had never been back to the grave until the afternoon when they returned as eighty-year-old women to bury their brother. And though my brother and I had lived as small boys just a few blocks from the cemetery, no one had ever taken us there.
Not long ago I learned of the work being done by the Foundation for Preeclampsia to try to find a cause and cure for the condition that killed my mother and that still kills 76,000 pregnant women, and half a million babies each year.
At this point in my life I have begun to wonder if all the books and movies I’ve written across my time were just my way of trying to learn to write well enough to tell my mother’s story. Now that my four children are through college, I am going to devote all my time and energy to making my mother’s movie as a way of bringing a new awareness to preeclampsia, with a share of profits from the movie going to the Foundation.
The ending of the film is very important. My father, being so young and also shattered by my mother’s death, was advised to place my twin brother and me in the Lutheran Orphanage. He drove there on a Saturday morning in his beloved Chevy, his honeymoon car, with us wrapped in blankets on the seat beside him to give us up. He pulled into the courtyard where the orphans were gathered and he could see as they drew near his car that these children were hoping this might be someone arriving to adopt one of them. He got out of the car and when he looked back in the window at us, he knew that he could not leave us there. And so he drove away from the orphanage with us still beside him, to begin his life as our father.
Written by Don Snyder
