Visiting, by Polly Walker Blakemore

When Polly Walker Blakemore’s mother entered hospice with dementia and depression, Blakemore realized their time together would be dwindling. A lifelong diarist, Blakemore also understood she had a chance to record the small, ordinary moments that knit a family and a home together—just as she had when her mother’s mother approached the end of her life 30 years earlier.

Expecting only a few months with her mother, Blakemore visited her as often as she could. They watched The Pioneer Woman and vet shows, debated the best burgers in town, shuffled between the TV room and the sunroom, counted pills and changed diapers, and wondered whether being ready for God might be as simple as the Barefoot Contessa’s 1-2-3 recipe for roasted root vegetables. Nothing much—and yet everything—because presence was the point.

Those months stretched into two and a half years, and Visiting is Blakemore’s intimate, wry, and clear-eyed account of that time—a portrait of a mother, a daughter, and the cadre of caregivers who accompanied them through a slow but certain decline. Rich in domestic detail and emotional truth, Visiting captures the bewilderment, tedium, absurdity, poignancy, urgency, and unexpected grace notes of end-of-life care.

With vivid, keenly observed prose, Blakemore illuminates what it means to be present with someone whose light is fragmenting and fading—and why such days, small as they seem, become the ones we value most.