Just Hold Her: A Foster Mother's Memoir of Medicine, Caregiving, and the Long Nights Together - Hardcover

"Would you, please... just hold her until she dies?"

A two-year vigil. A hand-drawn grid. A refusal to let go.

Not one spiral notebook. Several. Opened and closed every two hours until the record of one small life filled more pages than anyone expected to need.

Every page holds the same hand-drawn grid - columns ruled across lined paper: diapers, glucose, injections, feedings, time. A foster care diary reconstructed from original primary-source medical logs, documented inside a quiet Michigan house while the medical system prepared for a different outcome. Two-hour cycles, recorded without interruption. High-risk infancy witnessed in real time by the woman who stayed.

In the margins of those columns, where the grid ran out of room, Judy Wright wrote the rest. The observations that had no heading. A weight that held. A response that shouldn't have been there. The question she kept returning to, long after the institution had moved on: What about breast milk?

Just Hold Her is a literary memoir built from those personal journals. A true story of fostering lived at the collision of maternal intuition and institutional protocol. Named Michigan's Foster Parents of the Year by the Michigan Supreme Court, Judy and her husband John had spent more than a decade navigating neonatal care and life-limiting diagnosis inside Michigan's foster care system, caring for dozens of medically fragile children. None of that prepared her for this. The medical narrative written in those margins became the most demanding record of all: the meticulous account of what it costs to stay when the system has already moved on.

For readers of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and Kathy Harrison's Another Place at the Table, Just Hold Her is a meticulous exploration of love at the limits of authority. A caregiver memoir in the tradition of When Breath Becomes Air. A witness story, not a rescue story. This literary memoir is for anyone who has loved without guarantees, carried responsibility without certainty, or learned that presence is sometimes the only answer left.

When you purchase Just Hold Her, you are helping extend that same commitment to the next generation of foster youth through the John and Judy Wright Scholarship in partnership with the Ennis Center for Children.