Gregory Floyd is known to Catholic readers for his powerful, bestselling book: A Grief Unveiled: One Father’s Journey Through the Death of a Child, a memoir about maintaining faith in the aftermath of the tragic death of his 6-year-old son John Paul.

With his latest book, Unforgettable: How Remembering God’s Presence in Our Past Brings Hope to Our Future, Floyd touches his readers’ hearts again with personal stories about his life in connection with meditations on beauty, marriage, family and prayer.

Floyd begins the book by recalling a conversation with his aging mother, who has Alzheimer’s. She did not remember his name; Floyd’s mother, a woman with an advanced degree in French literature, could only call him “love.” He begins to think about memories: what they are and how they shape us. He ponders the question of who we are without our memories. What do memories reveal about us? Where do they lead? How do they connect us to God?

“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,” writes Floyd.

In 2017, Floyd decided to record these “unbidden” memories. This book is his ponderings on what these memories meant to him and what God is trying to reveal through them.

One of the first memories that Floyd relates is an event that happened to him at the age of 18 at 3 a.m. He heard a word pressed into his heart that he knew came from God. Before this event, he had been trying to live his Catholic faith, but did not know God.

After this event, everything changed.

“I let go of being the primary driver of my life and let him take over. These contemporary evangelical metaphors for conversion sound so overused, except for one thing: they are true,” he writes.

One of the best chapters has to do with Floyd’s parents and Scottish/Irish grandparents. Readers can almost see the brownstone in Brooklyn where Floyd spent his childhood. His grandparents and aunts and uncles would listen to music from an old Victrola record player on Sunday nights.

“They would put records on and dance in the living room as someone turned it by hand,” he writes.

“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,” writes Floyd.

The only thing certain for Floyd’s grandparents in their adopted country was the Catholic faith.

He recalls another day when his mother was making him tea in the kitchen as a child. As she poured the milk into the teacup she tells him, “That is what your soul is like – it is dark, and when the grace of God comes, it turns the darkness to light.”

The memories Floyd shares range from his high school days to his college years at Brown University, his time working at St. Antoninus Church in Newark, New Jersey, to his marriage and family life with Maureen, the raising of their nine children, and then their missionary time in Ireland and England. He also revisits the time when son John Paul was killed by a car.

It is hard not to shed tears while reading this book. At other times, it is easy to laugh out loud.

Unforgettable is one of those books where you find yourself underlining passages and writing notes in the margins. You don’t want to read it too fast because it is rich with wisdom, wit and authenticity. You sense that the words you are reading are true and that God is speaking to you through them.

Beyond Floyd’s stories, the reader is captivated by his lyrical way of writing:

“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,” he writes.

Floyd writes at length about the fact that human beings are built for community.

“Clearly there would be no such thing as Christian community if God did not desire it: it is just too difficult,” he writes. “The only thing more difficult is life without it.”

He also relates a truth that any practicing Catholic who intentionally tries to live in community knows:

“To have men and women, brothers and sisters in Christ, with whom I have been able to worship God and share my life in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, in times of crisis and times of serendipity, in life and in death, had been an inestimable gift. The darkness around me is much darker than I normally give it credit for. But so is the brightness. The call to community is a call to point one another to the light. It is one beggar showing another beggar where the food is.”