Notifications are [...] ephemeral, meaning I might forget about it if I don't deal with it immediately.

If you do like the notification method aside from this issue, try passing "--urgency=critical" or "--expire-time=0" to notify-send. Either (or both) of those should make the notifications stay popped up, assuming your notification daemon is doing something reasonable with those hints.

(Disclosure: I'm the author of xfce4-notifyd, which does behave in this way; other daemons may do other things.)