Reviewed by Magdalena Ball
Bring Us Home From Sorrow
By Joanne Fedler
Ginninderra Press
March 2026, ISBN: 9781761097232, Paperback, 270 pages, $A34.99
It’s been twelve years since my mother died but the intensity of the three months from diagnosis to death still feels fresh. At the time of her death I had three teenaged children, all needy in the way of teenagers. She lived in Charlottesville, Virginia and I lived in NSW, Australia so the three trips I took to care for her over that period were exhausting and left me feeling torn between the parental and the filial in a way that Joanne Fedler’s captures perfectly in her beautiful new book Bring Us Home From Sorrow.
Bring Us Home from Sorrow is an ode to Fedler’s mother who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in December 2020. 2021 was the peak of the Australian Covid lockdown with border closures, stringent quarantines, and limitations on where people could go. In the midst of this, Fedler managed to get an exemption from the border closing and flew to South Africa to be with her mother following the diagnosis, leaving her husband and two children in Sydney. It’s no spoiler to say that the disease progresses through a series of gruelling and ultimately fatal chemo treatments. Throughout her mother’s illness, Fedler supports and is supported by her two sisters and her father and their dance of grief, strength, need and love is deeply moving. The way in which the cancer impacts the family, the growing epidemic, and Fedler’s ongoing love of ocean swimming come together with visceral and often poetic detail, creating a story about the many ways we are bound to one another:
Families, I saw, are not made up of individuals but are more like cells in a living ecosystem which share not only DNA, but narratives, phobias and hauntings. What happens to one of us, happens to all. What injuries one suffers, hurt everyone. And perhaps, the healing of one might offer relief to all. (39)
There are so many aspects of the cancer journey and mother and daughter relationship that resonate, from the migrant’s continual sense of displacement to the ever-present mingling of exasperation and guilt.
I am angry with myself. I have been blisteringly, blindly naive. Toxically positive. I hd faith that my mother would fight this longer, she’d respond better to the treatment, we’d have more time. And what about those bloody Turkey Tail mushroom tablets. (135)
I was also toxically positive, taking my increasingly frail mother on long walks, encouraging her to run up and down steps, and not accepting my mother’s own awareness of the severity of her illness. My mother was a lifelong hypochondriac, so when she really got sick, I was already well-versed in side stepping her desire to talk about her illness. In Fedler’s case, her mother was a stoic, and the interactions between the family’s desperate hope, and her mother’s growing resignation provide a tension that is both personal and utterly relatable. The story of Dov Fedler is particularly poignant as he comes to terms with losing a life partner who also managed everything for him. The way Fedler supports her father through the transition is tender and intimate, taking her father in hand and helping him deal with his grief and all of the resonances from his childhood loss that it brings up:
Here is where things change. In our language. In how we speak. In how we move from magical to realistic thinking. We stop looking at butterfly resuscitation as a ‘good sign,’ We try to make a home in a place where butterflies die. (117)
Perhaps the most pervasive story in this book is the Fedler’s connection with the ocean and the ways in which it carries her through the grieving process and provides some form of solace. We are all oceanic creatures, bound and connected by this critical life-support system that links the food we eat to the very water in our bodies (over 60% of the human body is water at a similar salinity to the ocean), and by a common ancestor. Fedler finds ways to swim throughout her mother’s illness. Ultimately, ocean swimming is what brings Fedler back to life:
My life has become a story of water; I no longer think of myself as separate from it. I have sunk into the ocean’s dreaming. When I am fast from the sea, I am homesick for it. I have never belonged to any place more than I do in these waters. Over the past year, my life-force has flowed back into me like a new tide. (243)
Though Bring Us Home From Sorrow is a book that moves through death and deep grief, it is expansive and even in its darkest moments, uplifting. It reminds us that none of us are alone – that we are all held in our grief by the communities we belong to and the unique forms of grief and love that everyone experiences. Bring Us Home From Sorrow is a beautiful and moving book:
In this moment, I am being rocked by the muscle of the ocean’s body against mine, and I feel part of whatever all this means. It is here that I touch a long ancestral heritage, deeper than blood family, broader than human bodies, an alchemy of rock and wind and water and fish and crustacean and mammal. (244)