Tell It to the Water

Five Siblings Tell of Their Father's Grief and His Struggle Back to Hope

By: Donna Morrissey

From the acclaimed and bestselling author Donna Morrissey, a memoir of love, grief, and the meaning of family that sings with her inimitable style and the voices of her unforgettable Newfoundland parents and siblings.

A voice-driven, compact, and powerful memoir of siblings dealing with the loss of their mother while trying to save their stubborn, loving, but infuriating father from the self-destruction of his own grief.

Each of Donna’s four surviving siblings speak in their unique voices, arguing, laughing, singing. Their never-far-from-mind deceased brother Ford is present in the background, as is their mother, but their father “’Nerk” is the complicated centre around which they all turn.

A man who represents a way of life nearly gone even from the far-flung outposts of Newfoundland, Enerchius Osmond is never fully himself unless he is tramping the land with a gun—you always shoots to kill, you never let anything suffer, is his constant lesson—or mucking about in his remote, hand-built cabin, or on the water skirting seals, pan-ice, and looming swells. The siblings bring him to Halifax after his wife dies, but staring at an asphalt driveway instead of the sea nearly kills him, and so they take him home. Which nearly does them all in as well.

A distillation of love and grief, of guilt and celebration, shot through with Donna’s—and her whole family’s—unquenchable humour and resourcefulness, this memoir is for anyone who knows just how infuriating family can be, and just how great a gift.