“Would you, please… just hold her until she dies?”

The call came on a Friday morning. A baby girl. Two months old. Four pounds. Exposed to cocaine and syphilis in the womb. Not expected to survive. The foster care agency wasn't looking for a miracle. They were looking for someone willing to stay.

What followed filled several spiral notebooks.

Every page held the same hand-drawn grid: glucose readings, feedings, medications, diapers, time. Every two hours, day and night, Judy Wright opened the notebook and recorded another line. What began as a way to track a medically fragile infant became something more — a real-time record of a life that kept exceeding expectations, and of the people who kept showing up for it.

Built from Judy's original journals and medical logs, Just Hold Her is a memoir of foster care, caregiving, and medical advocacy lived one two-hour cycle at a time. The grid captured the numbers. The margins held everything else: questions without answers, small changes that mattered, and the growing tension between institutional protocol and a foster mother's insistence that something had been overlooked.

As specialists, therapists, caseworkers, and courts shaped Jayden's future, Judy and her husband John built their lives around hers. Along the way, a grassroots network of donor milk mothers — the Pumpin' Mamas — helped sustain a child few expected to reach her next birthday.

This is not a rescue story. It is a witness story. A record of what it costs to remain present when outcomes are uncertain, and of the ordinary acts of care that accumulate into something larger than hope.

For readers of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and Kathy Harrison's Another Place at the Table, Just Hold Her explores love at the limits of authority, where documentation becomes devotion and presence becomes its own kind of answer.

Judy Wright and her husband John were named Michigan's Foster Parents of the Year by the Michigan Supreme Court. A portion of proceeds supports the John and Judy Wright Scholarship for Foster Children in partnership with the Ennis Center for Children.

“A fantastic read. A true testament to modern medicine, unconditional love, and compassion. I couldn't put it down.”

— Linda Thulin, Nurse, Caregiver, Mother