WELCOME

Sharon is an award-winning short story writer whose stories deal with the messy business of love, family, and relationships. She’s also the author of a novel, Across A Narrow Strait, and a nonfiction book, Up Close & Personal. In April her memoir, Walking Each Other Home, will be released by BWL Publishing.

Sharon also hosts the radio program and podcast Beyond the Page, where she interviews authors in the Comox Valley and beyond. Recent shows feature best-selling Canadian authors Susan Juby, Timothy Taylor, and Sarah Leavitt. Beyond the Page airs on Comox Valley radio, DIG FM. You can listen to the podcast anytime on the web at https://sites.libsyn.com/575815 or on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, where the title is Beyond the Page in the Comox Valley.

COMING in APRIL 2026!

REVIEWS

With unflinching honesty, Sharon McInnes reveals not only the grief and stress involved in caring for her mother, but also the brilliant and unexpected rewards. I’m so grateful for her depiction of the beautiful parts of caregiving — shared intimacy, deep love, laughter and silliness even in the midst of tragedy. And I’m just as grateful for her frankness about rage, despair and cleaning up poop. Walking Each Other Home is a comfort and inspiration for anyone involved in the life-changing work of caregiving.  
Sarah Leavitt, author of Something, Not Nothing: A Story of Grief and Love. 

It’s hard to write about family, particularly when a family is suffering. And yet author Sharon McInnes does it exceptionally well. Add to that a brilliant grasp of dialogue. Perhaps her experience as a caregiver plays a part. Or the fact she’s a master of words, able to articulate emotions we all feel but don’t always care to acknowledge.
For these reasons I feel this book is invaluable. If you have parents, Walking Each Other Home represents the things we should know, talk about, share, and prepare for. As a career caregiver, McInnes understands the process of managing, coping, and dealing with people in need. And when the person needing that care is your parent, little else really matters. 
Having recently lost my own mother, I suspect that this book felt particularly on point. But the fact remains that its content may well apply to most everyone, to some degree, at some time. I also happened to have a father who began to falter from the onset of dementia before choosing to terminate his life rather than suffer that alternate demise.
This book is a personal and yet relatable account of caring, and not merely enduring a difficult situation but in fact thriving in that demanding and challenging time. The execution and content are admirable. To reiterate, McInnes writes well, with sentient visuals, relatable phrasing, and solid, sound dialogue. The reader lives what she lives, side by side in real time. I was aware of being glad I was reading this book as I read it. Feeling, in a manner, that I’m better prepared for a future I can’t possibly know.   Bill Arnott, author of A Perfect Day for a Walk

As I read Sharon McInnes’ Walking Each Other Home, a hopeful, evocative title by the way, I couldn’t help but pace myself in that challenging journey. In many of my activities I rush along, eager to complete the task. Reading books, not so much. I like to savour them, and, typically, cumbersomely perhaps, have a few on the go at any one time.
There is in Walking Each Other Home a weight, a poignancy of agonizing proportion that obliged me to move slowly. McInnes thoughtfully penetrates the love and the wounds of caring for her mother over a period of eighteen months, an exacting voyage that ends a few short months into Covid.  Immersing myself in the book in portions of time added to my appreciation of her commitment, and not just hers but her partner’s as well, and other family members, to the intensity of the expedition.   
Often, McInnes questions her capacity to continue. She honestly understands her own needs for alone time, sanctuary. She also does not hold back on the emotional complexity of servicing/appraising the increasing needs of her mother. At one point she notes a particularly uncomfortable activity: 

“One morning, I find myself in the bathroom slowly picking away, with the blunt end of a pair of tweezers, at the hard stool that’s been lodged in her bum for two days, while she grasps the edge of the counter and an unpleasant odour fills the tiny room. What the hell am I doing? The boundaries of acceptable behaviour have changed dramatically…”

At that juncture, for me, the reality of her memoir/passage could not be more impactful.
Throughout the book, Sharon McInnes takes welcome issue with the health care systems she is compelled to deal with. Though there are moments of almost agreeable bureaucratic engagement, much of her interactions with a variety of health care authorities is burdened with angst. Not just angst. Anger. Visceral anger at the systems she is forced (yes forced) to consider, their weaknesses, some simply of the human variety, others entrenched organizational ossification. As a former chair of Hornby Denman Health, a small multi-service organization that cut its teeth decades ago on the provision of localized home support to seniors (hugely modified post Covid, regrettably) I appreciated that she does not shy away from identifying the barriers she encountered to better services.
Walking Each Other Home is a powerful and personal treatise, powerful and full of lessons. Questions as well. McInnes ends with this afterword, a valuable political appeal: “It is my fervent hope that, as a society, we gain the political will to turn already-existing models of dementia care, ones that honour the individuality and dignity of our elders and support their families, from vision into reality. Surely this is not too much to ask.”
Bill Engleson, Author, RSW (Retired and Non-Practicing)