" 

 In March of 2010, sitting beside his father's bed in the final hours of his life, Snyder wrote the last scenes in the screenplay of his father's love story with Peggy, a script he had been working on for almost ten years. 
 On Sunday evening October 5, Snyder was interviewed about his journey to carry his mother's story into the world, on the radio program After Hours by the celebrated Chicago journalist and writer, Rick Kogan.  
 Snyder spoke about the speech he was about to give to the board of directors of  Chicago's Lying In Hospital with the hope tha this movie will raise awareness of eclampsia, the condition that killed his mother at age nineteen, in 1950 and that is still the main cause of death among pregnant mothers and their babies. 
 That speech contains the essence of his script which is titled,  ""The Way Love Is.""   
 Most of us never know the love story that carried us into this world Who were those people in the old black and white photographs - He with his crew cut and raccoon coat. She  in lipstick and her beehive hairdo. 
 There they are in all their glory. So Young. 
 Much too young to ever grow old. With their arms around each other, and their eyes bright with passion as if they almost believed that they could go on forever that way, so that at the end of their lives they would have no regrets, they would not have to wish that they had loved each other better when they had the chance. 
 Those people in the old photographs remain strangers to us all our lives in that sense I suppose we are all orphans...  And sometimes we are strangers       even to ourselves. 
 I set out some time ago to discover the love story that carried me into this world. 
 And when I finally knew it  its dimensions, and its force I learned that every love story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. But they don't always come in that order. 
 Such is the love story that I am going to tell you today.  
 For me, it began in the spring of 1998 when I was in Chicago for a book that I had written. I was  in the Green Room where they were putting on my make-up before walking onto Oprah's stage when one of her producers asked me what I was going to write next. 
 I can't explain this really, but I told her that I might try to write about my father. 
 I told her that I had never known him at all and that I wanted to spend some time with him and get to know what it was that made him so distant all my life.  
 I remembered being his little boy, following him around everywhere he went, asking him if I was his buddy, and he was always trying to get away from me. I used to walk beside him when he mowed the law with his push mower, I was a chatter box, I never shut up. I would ask him one question after another and he would never answer me.  
 Then he finally got a power motor with an engine so loud that he didn't have to pretend he couldn't hear me. 
 You have a father like this and what you really need to do is crack him open and find out what he is so afraid of. 
 It always comes down to our fears, doesn't it?  
 In the end, our fears define us.  
 Our fears determine the contours of our lives. 
 For  years there had been a great distance separating my father and me. And then I went to visit him when he had grown old and his health was declining.  
 We were sitting there in his little apartment and he showed me a black and white photograph of him on his wedding day. 
 Only it wasn't his wedding day to the only mother I had ever known. 
 It was to a mother I hadn't known. 
 There I was at age fifty and my father was telling me for the first time that my real mother had died when she was nineteen years old. 
 I drove him to the cemetery a few miles away and he showed me where she was buried  
 as a boy I had lived just a few blocks from the cemetery but no one ever took me there. 
 No one ever said a word to me about her. 
 I set out then to find out why and to learn all that I could about this nineteen year old girl who had died in the ninth month of her marriage to my Dad. 
 I found her bridesmaids who were now elderly women. 
 I found her friend who had played field hockey with her in high school. 
 I found a girl who had worked with her caring for the children at the Lutheran Orphanage. 
 I found the woman who taught her how to sew her fancy dresses. 
 I found the nurse who sat beside her at the end of her life on an August morning in 1950 and wrote down her last sentences on a slip of paper and then kept that slip of paper for fifty years, long enough to place it in my hand. 
 Everyone in town remembered the death of this nineteen year old girl because she left behind new born twin sons. 
 Everyone remembered her doctor's name and still blamed him for her death. 
 I found him living a few miles from the cemetery, a distinguished looking man in his late sev