Unforgettable: How Remembering God's Presence in Our Past Brings Hope to Our Future

By Gregory Floyd

From beloved spiritual writer and Catholic leader Gregory Floyd comes a moving meditation on the power of memory and how God is often more clearly seen when we look back.

This is a book about memory, about what stays in the mind, and why. It is a book about the presence of God in our lives and the sights, sounds, words, and experiences that become unforgettable. Beginning with a single word he heard in the middle of the night—one that changed his life—this powerful memoir by Gregory Floyd asks the question: without memory, who are we? It is a meditation on beauty, marriage, family, and prayer, asking of the memories that each implants: what do they reveal? Where do they lead? —and witnessing to their potential to draw us to God.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paraclete Press
• Release date: Jan 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781640605657

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

You know, love, the white thing in the sky. That’s what the disease had done to her. I was no longer her son with the name that she had given me. I was now love," along with everyone else whose names she could no longer remember. Moon, the white thing in the sky, was the word she could no longer find. But at least I was love: there was some body memory in place, some knowledge that my body and hers were related in a way different from the woman who bathed her or the man who polished the floors. Alzheimer’s had taken her away from us, breaking off another piece of her memory each day.

Watching Mom lose her memory made me think a lot about memory. There is the obvious question: will it happen to me? Since I come from her and share her DNA, will we share a similar journey into the dark night of forgetfulness? There is also the more philosophical one: to what extent am I who I am because of what I remember? Without memory, who am I?

People who write dictionaries tell us that memory is a faculty of the mind. It’s the mechanism by which information is encoded, stored, and retrieved. It enables us to retain what we have learned from activity or experience. It is a storehouse full of things that we recall and recognize. It comes from an old Latin word that means mindful: the things kept in the mind. Memory dwells in the mind. We often use the words brain and mind interchangeably. However, the brain is a thing of substance and dimensions: it has size and heft. You can take it out (carefully!) and examine it. It’s a body part, like the arm or the hand. That’s why doctors can do brain surgery. But the mind has no such dimensions. You can’t do mind surgery.

As I reflected on memory, its presence and its absence, I found myself thinking about the things that are kept in the mind. In particular, I found myself thinking about the things that come to us without our looking for them. Things that are, in fact, unforgettable: words and experiences, sights and sounds that have made such an impression on us that they live on in our minds. Things that come to us unbidden. Some are like guests who left the table for a moment and then returned; others are like friends who went away for the summer and came back in the fall. And then there are those that are like ghosts or demons that find us gasping for air in the middle of the night.

In 2017 I recorded those memories. When they came, I wrote them down in my cell phone. They have one thing in common: I did not go searching for them. That was the only rule: they had to have come to me, and they had to have come frequently enough to be recognized as old companions. There are plenty of other ideas, words, and experiences that I have been struck by in my reading or in talking to someone in recent years. They are not included here. They may count in the future, but not today. These memories, these companions, come from as far back as the mid-1950s. They have been speaking to me for at least thirty or forty or fifty years. What do they reveal? What do they mean? Where do they lead?

The most unforgettable experience of my life happened when I was eighteen years old. In the middle of the night my life changed dramatically. There have been many experiences since that fateful evening, but that one held the call. Call it a vortex night, one that the first eighteen years of my life fell into without being lost. Call it time bending over itself, some elastic reality that allowed everything that preceded it to find a home while at the same time opening up everything about the future. Whatever else it would prove to be, that night divided my life in two: the time before that 3:00 a.m. and the time after.

Since that night, I have been engaged in a battle. Before that night the battle raged as it has since the beginning: I was simply a casualty. That night, however, was a call to arms. I could never have identified it as such back then; only in retrospect would I grasp the dimensions of the struggle. The battle has involved my wife and my nine children, including the death of an incredibly lovely son. It has reckoned God and the devil as its main protagonists, and my small and relatively insignificant life as the battlefield. Not that I have been an unwitting participant or a passive observer: I have served in both their platoons. The battle is set in the world I live in, with all its beauty and terror, good and evil, darkness and light. It will continue until the day I die. That day will come in the not too distant future, and when it does, I will hopefully see God face-to-face. Sometimes I think that when I see him, I will never say another word. I imagine there may be a relief so deep that words would never suffice to express it. But for now, I must speak.

Of what? Of a love that met me at eighteen in the winter of 1972. Of a voice that spoke my name in a way that I could not doubt. Of a wager I made. Of a soul that found rest. Of sin and forgiveness. Of a God without borders, without conditions, without boxes or categories, a God who invaded everything I could think about by the sheer force of his attraction. A God who drew everything inside me. A God whose love slid off edges and sundered boundaries and hid in corners where I thought I could not go.

A God who said things like We wrote you, clear as the sun setting on Barnegat Bay, casting its final flares over the darkening sky. Which is how this book began. Three small words that were an answer to prayer and a word about writing, from St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. Nothing remarkable in those words, except that I had asked God to give me a word about writing. I was looking for a sign, so I told God that I would open the Bible and if there was a word about writing, I would write. I figured that there weren’t too many words about writing. God only needed one.

And so, after many years, I began to write again. I picked up my pen in order to return to the silence I had discovered when I wrote A Grief Unveiled. That silence was full. It had weightiness. I knew I needed to return to that silence, a silence more real than all the noise that surrounds it. My noisy life keeps me from loving God as I should, and the world I live in conspires to make me love him less. The noise of that exterior world, however, is nothing compared to the noise within: a cacophony of contrary voices that pull me toward themselves. They are subtle and seductive, and they all seem to know my name. They remind me of the battle I’m in: the temptation to love the beauty that surrounds me rather than the source of that beauty, to be so attracted to people that I fail to make a sober reckoning of the forces that prey upon them. In the midst of the fray, God occasionally pulls back the veil just enough for me to catch a glimpse of what is really going on. Like the time I walked out of the Port Authority building in New York City and saw a woman smashing her head into the sidewalk. A young cop was trying to prevent her from destroying her face, which was swollen, bruised, and bloody. He tried to cushion her body to prevent further damage. She was violent and brutal, though to no one but herself. So much for the sophistication of midtown Manhattan. The voices were screaming.

In the silence, however, the things I cannot forget remind me of God: the lights through which he draws me and the darkness from which he saves me. When I am still, I notice his grace like the air around me. Grace like air. I remember a morning at the beach years ago. My three youngest daughters walked quietly down the stairs, unaware that I was watching them, little girls with tousled hair in sleeveless summer nightgowns. Botticelli would have put nightgowns on his Three Graces had he seen them. The memory came back to me while writing. And I thought, this is how it will have to be: moments captured here and there, moments stolen from the crush of my life. I had been reading the New York Times Book Review, something I do once in a great while on vacation. It was a telling commentary: book after book on the premeditated murder of this one, the compulsive fornication of that one, the old gals getting together to talk about sex and love and a lifetime of disappointments once they’d had enough to drink. Nowhere in the New York Times were they talking about God. The Word had apparently been banished from the world of words. But once, when I was young, I heard a word and it changed my life. It took me eighteen years to hear it and whatever time I have left to understand it. But it did not come out of a void.

CHAPTER 1

A New York Frame of Mind

For God’s sake, will you get me there. It was a command, not a question. He was driving as fast as he could down one-way streets in Lower Manhattan in the early hours of the morning. She, clutching the door with one hand and the dashboard with the other, was having contractions every five minutes. I was arriving furiously on a winter’s night in 1954 as we made our way to St. Vincent’s Hospital on 13th Street in Greenwich Village. Mom and Dad had returned to New York from Strasbourg, France, in 1953. Ostensibly, they had been graduate students at the University of Strasbourg, he studying international law and she beginning a doctorate in French literature. Not bad for two Catholic kids from Brooklyn. In reality, my father worked, as he used to say, in a confidential manner, for a branch of the United States government." In other words, he was a spy. His job was to determine the extent of Communist influence in the French government of the early 1950s and to set up listening posts and look for safe houses and landing fields where small groups of commandos could drop down in the event of a Russian invasion. In the political landscape of the mid-twentieth century, this was considered a distinct possibility.

To do so, Richard Floyd had to pass for a Frenchman. Being dark and handsome was a good start. Beyond that, his French vocabulary and accent were such that no one knew he was an American. Incredibly, he learned it all at the Xaverian Brothers High School in Brooklyn in the early 1940s. Clearly, he had a gift. His mother was Lillian Kane, a Scottish beauty from Glasgow who had come to New York by herself at the age of eighteen. While in Brooklyn she met Raymond Floyd at a parish dance at Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Raymond’s family had arrived in America via Ireland, England, and Prince Edward Island before landing in Boston. When Raymond’s parents separated, his mother took him with her and went to live in Brooklyn. When Lillian returned to Glasgow, Raymond wrote her and asked her to come back and marry him. This she did, at the age of twenty-five. Nana and Bubba, we called them.

In an unusual move, Nana’s parents and her three sisters followed her to New York. In the early years of their marriage Nana and Bubba and the rest of the family would go over to Grandma and Grandpa Kane’s on Sunday evenings. They had an old Victrola record player. They would put records on and dance in the living room as someone turned it by hand. It had that tinny, scratchy sound people know from old war movies. For refreshments, there was a round container with a top and a handle. They would take it to the nearest bar where for twenty-five cents the bartender would fill it with beer. It was called a growler, because the beer made a growling sound as it fizzed. When it was hot outside and they were thirsty they would go back a few times. This was called rushing the growler.

Seven immigrants, my ancestors, spending a few cents each for an evening of entertainment. Seven immigrants, most of them with thick accents that would label them as foreign, dancing at the bottom of the economic totem pole. Seven immigrants who were family in the midst of uncertain territory. Nana and Bubba had four sons and a daughter who went on, in the great upward thrust of the children of immigrants, to become teachers and businessmen. Their daughter became fashion model.

Real love. That’s what Thomas Charles and Agnes McGrath had. Everybody knew it. Pop-Pop was very smart, an engineer. In fact, he was one of the engineers responsible for building the Church of Our Savior on Park Avenue in Manhattan, to this day one of Manhattan’s most beautiful churches. Family lore says he invented a prototype of the air conditioner. He spent time on projects in Bermuda. At one point he owned twenty-five lots in Southampton, Long Island. I used to wonder what our family life would have been like had he been able to hang on to those lots. He died at the age of sixty-five of emphysema.

Both Tom’s and Agnes’s parents were from the west of Ireland. Agnes’s parents came to New York in 1888 and were married there. They had one girl and three boys. Though she never went past sixth grade, Agnes was a smart Irishwoman. While Nana never lost her Glasgow burr, Momsy, as we called her, was essentially a New York girl, born in a house near St. Agnes Church on 42nd Street in Midtown Manhattan. Although she spent her childhood in Manhattan and the Bronx, Momsy had every Irish inflection and turn of phrase imaginable, right down to the short intake of air at the end of a phrase that the Irish make to this very day. As a child I would hear her on the phone: So I says to myself says I … She would refer to Pop-Pop as himself. God love you, she would say to us with a sweetness that was mesmerizing. Many years later when I was a student in Ireland, I would come to realize that the vocal patterns were identical to the native ones and that only the accent had changed. Mom once told me that the first time Momsy saw me, she said, So this is the little one I’ve been praying for all these months!

In the 1970s, Momsy was getting sicker and her eyes were failing. My Mom, her daughter Sheila, was teaching in Staten Island, just across the Hudson River. She frequently drove across the Verrazzano Bridge to visit her. She and her sisters had made arrangements for the local parish priest to come to the house and give her Holy Communion. One day Mom walked into the dining room and Momsy was polishing a pair of brass candlesticks that her own mother had brought over from Ireland. When my mother asked her what she was doing, she replied that Fr. Lynch was coming over to give her Communion. Mom told her she didn’t need to go to all that fuss. With mild perturbation she looked at mother and said, And what if I want to get the house ready for the Lord who is coming to visit me?

My grandfathers died many years before my grandmothers. My impressions of my grandmothers, consequently, are much more vivid. But it is not only that. They appear, in my memory, to have had much stronger personalities than their husbands. This seems to be something in the blood of Celtic women. Learning the history of the west of Ireland gave me some clues—of the men who went off to Scotland to find work because there was none in Ireland. Of the ten months a year they spent there earning money to send home. Of them coming home in the summer and leaving again in the fall for another ten-month stint, with their wives pregnant again, and the family farm to run and the children to take care of. This is the stuff of strong backs and weathered skin and wills of iron and no time for nonsense.

Whatever the differences in personality and character, my ancestors had their financial worries and their faith in common. I realize that compared to people in danger of starving, they were not poor. But they lived always wondering how the next bill would be paid. They were part of the great American immigrant story.

There was at times an inability to admit that things were less than perfect. This is not unique to those of a Celtic strain—I suspect most immigrants share it to one degree or another, especially in the first generation. You want to fit in. In contrast to today’s culture in which every difficulty or complaint is worn like a badge of honor, this was a complex mixture of something admirable and something unhealthy, which occasionally left people sailing past reality in favor of appearances. Yet it was combined with great love and generosity. Pop-pop, for example, would buy Momsy a piece of jewelry for her birthday because he knew that if he gave her money, she would spend it on the children. Ironically, like a scene from an O. Henry story, one day her house was broken into and the jewelry was stolen.

My grandparents and their ancestors brought to this country their faith, and they passed it on to my parents. This faith produced a culture that had the Big Ideas (Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, Transubstantiation, the Communion of Saints), the Big Sins (usually in the realm of sex, though rarely talked about) and the Big Questions (How Many Angels Can Dance on the Head of a Pin? If They Never Heard of God Will They Go to Hell? What Happens to the Pagan Babies?) as its points of reference, like so many buoys in the New York Bay. A culture that no longer exists formed their expectations of what life would be like. Only in the lives of their children would the great shift occur in which most of the truths they knew would be up for grabs. Even so, the ground beneath them was shifting as America assumed its place of prominence in the world.

When I was a child, Brooklyn still had a few mansions overlooking the Narrows, the body of water separating Upper and Lower New York Bay. We lived in an apartment on the second floor of a brownstone. Today it would sell for a million dollars, but then it was where young families started out, one on each floor. Our street was Colonial Road, though it looked anything but colonial. Next to it was a convent with a huge wall around it, the Visitation Convent. In those days, Catholics did not say they were from Brooklyn. They were from St. Patrick’s or St. Anselm’s or Holy Family.

I remember one day standing at the kitchen while my mother was making tea. As she took the milk and poured it into the tea, she said, That is what your soul is like—it is dark, and then when the grace of God comes it turns from darkness to light. The Big Ideas. My first conscious image of faith, indelibly printed in my mind, came from a teapot.

My first experience of fear came from the fire alarm at the street corner. My older brother Rick and a neighborhood kid thought it would be fun to set off the alarm. When it sounded, they ran away. I was too scared to move. That must have been obvious to the