While walking Hudson recently, I dropped my iPhone. When it landed on the edge of the sidewalk, it made a particular kind of crackling sound that I knew didn’t mean anything good. When I picked it up and turned it over to look at the screen, I saw a crack on the lower right side, with a web of cracks stretching across most of the phone.

Here’s the part that surprised me: I wasn’t upset.

Not in a noble, deep-breathing, I-have-done-the-work way. I mean, I noticed the problem, thought huh, okay, and went to make coffee. Ten years ago—five, even—that same problem would have taken my whole afternoon hostage. I’d have replayed it. I’d have thought about all the ways this shouldn’t have happened. Hudson would have gotten a walk that was really just me pacing with a dog attached.

Instead: huh, okay. Coffee.

I’ve been trying to work out where that came from.

The easy explanation is grief, and the easy explanation isn’t wrong. Sitting in a hospital waiting room for twelve hours does something permanent to your sense of proportion. When Ken was sick, I learned to sort the world into two piles very quickly—things that were actually happening and things that were merely annoying—because I didn’t have the bandwidth to treat them the same. After he died, that sorting mechanism stayed installed—and receives regular updates, it appears. It’s one of the few things grief hands you that’s genuinely useful.

But that’s not the whole story, because for years afterward I still lost entire days to small indignities. I once had a property management guy call and accuse me of not paying rent I had absolutely paid, and I stewed. Loudly. To an empty apartment. (“What a dick,” I said, to no one, about a man who was mostly just doing his job badly.) Grief had recalibrated what counted as a catastrophe, but it hadn’t touched my fuse at all.

Something else did that. And I think it was the work.

For a long stretch of my life, I spent my best hours on things that weren’t mine. I’m not going to pretend it was misery—there were good people, real friendships, a paycheck that let me build a life. But the stakes were always somebody else’s stakes. The deadline was urgent because someone upstream had decided it was urgent. The crisis was a crisis because it appeared on a slide labeled Crisis. And when the actual meaning of your day is that thin, every disruption to it feels enormous. There’s nothing underneath to absorb the shock.

That’s the thing nobody tells you about meaningless work: it makes you fragile. Not because it’s hard, but because it isn’t. When the work doesn’t matter, the friction is all you’ve got. The broken printer becomes the whole point. The passive-aggressive reply-all becomes your personality for a Tuesday. You are, in a very real sense, looking for something to feel—and the only thing on offer is irritation.

I don’t have that problem anymore. Not because my days are smoother. They’re objectively messier. I’m running my own everything now: the writing, the coaching, the events, the shipping, the website that periodically decides to reinvent itself without consulting me. There is more that can go wrong on a random Wednesday than there ever was in a corporate job with an IT department and an org chart.

But it’s all pointed at something.

Ken used to say “right now is all we’re guaranteed,” in that deep voice that made it sound less like a bumper sticker and more like a dare. He also said “enjoy the journey,” which I found borderline insufferable at the time and now catch myself repeating out loud, alone, like a man who has become his husband’s tote bag.

What I’ve come to understand is that both of those only work if the journey is actually going somewhere you chose. It’s much more difficult to enjoy a journey you were assigned.

Now, when something goes wrong, it goes wrong inside work I care about. The shipment that got delayed was a shipment of my book. The tech that failed was tech for an event where I got to sit in a room with people who wanted to talk about their person. The problem is real, so it gets treated like a problem—handled, solved, moved past—instead of like an insult.

Purpose is a shock absorber. That’s the whole thesis. I didn’t get more patient; I got more cushioned.

There’s a second piece, too, and it’s less flattering to me.

Grief work is a permanent recalibration device. Every conversation resets the meter. It’s not that nothing bothers me; it’s that I keep getting reminded, professionally and repeatedly, what “bad” actually looks like.

I don’t recommend acquiring this particular perspective the way I acquired it. But I’d be lying if I said I wanted to give it back.

So: more patient at fifty-something than I was at forty. Not wiser, exactly. Not calmer, either—ask anyone who’s watched me try to park.

Just working on things that are mine, which turns out to be the difference between a bad day and a bad hour.

If you’re in a season where every small thing feels like the last straw, I’d gently suggest the problem might not be your temperament. It might be that nothing you’re doing is load-bearing. That’s fixable. Slowly, and probably not this month—but fixable.

Write on!

Ron Stempkowski is the author of The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories That Shape Us, a memoir-in-essays about learning to move with grief instead of moving on. If this story resonated, you can grab a signed copy—complete with a handwritten note—at ronstempkowski.com, or get your copy wherever books are sold. And if you'd like more stories like this one, join the journey and get them straight in your inbox.

Instead of panicking, I’ve spent this year rebuilding: leaning into writing full-time, getting certified as a grief coach, and figuring out what a career built entirely on my own terms actually looks like.

I decided to document it—the good, the messy, the unglamorous—in a new weekly vlog. This first episode covers:

→ Releasing “The Luck We Carry,” a memoir about grief after losing my husband, Ken

→ The pivot from a “meaningless” 9-to-5 to work that actually matters to me

→ My first author event at my local library (surreal doesn’t begin to cover it)

→ Why journaling has been the single most powerful tool in processing loss

→ The reality of building freelance and coaching work from scratch

If you’ve ever considered a pivot — whether by choice or circumstance — I hope this gives you an honest look at what it actually takes.

Watch the full episode below. 👇

#CareerPivot #GriefCoach #Memoir #Layoffs #Entrepreneurship #WritingCommunity #Reinvention #AuthorLife

I was walking Hudson in our favorite park the other day when my phone buzzed.

It was a friend. He said he’d been thinking about me and my book a lot lately, and then he told me why. A family member—someone the whole family orbits, someone they idolize—had been fighting an illness for over a year. The word terminal had entered the conversation. He and his wife had gone to be with the family. To support their person, and to support each other.

Then he told me he’d bought several more copies of The Luck We Carry. That he was planning to buy more for other people in the family. And he thanked me for writing it.

I stopped walking.

Hudson, who has never once objected to an unscheduled break, sat down in the grass and waited. I stood there on the edge of the track with my chin quivering, thumb hovering over a reply I couldn’t write yet, and I cried.

Not delicately. Not the single-tear, movie kind. The kind where you have to turn your face toward the trees so the woman power-walking past you can pretend she didn’t see.

The tears came for my friend, who is losing someone he loves and hasn’t lost him yet—which is its own particular country, one I lived in for eighteen months and can still find on a map.

They came for his family member, who is facing the end of his life and knows it.

They came for his family, several of whom I’ve met, who are right now learning the choreography of a house that revolves around one bed.

They came for every family doing that same choreography today, in every town, while the ground shifts under them.

They came for Ken.

And they came for me.

But beneath all of that was something I couldn’t name until I got home and sat down with my journal, which is where I usually find out what I actually think.

Here’s what I finally landed on: my friend was thanking me for something that only exists because Ken died.

There is no version of this book that doesn’t require that. Not one. Every essay in it was paid for in advance, in a currency I would give anything to get back. The Luck We Carry exists because on June 1, 2011, in our front room, in the ninth week of home hospice, my husband took his last breath and I had to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.

So when someone says thank you for writing this, what I hear underneath it—what I always hear—is thank you for surviving the thing that made you able to write it.

That’s a strange gift to accept. I’ve never gotten smooth at it.

And it got stranger this time, because he wasn’t buying one copy. He was buying several. He was buying them the way you buy folding chairs before people arrive—in multiples, because you know how many are coming. Somewhere in that text was the quiet math of a family bracing for impact. My book was going to be handed around a living room I’ve never been in, to people who don’t know yet how much they’re about to need it.

I don’t know how to feel proud of that. I’m not sure proud is the word.

What I’ve settled on, at least for today, is this.

When Ken was dying, I wrote at night after he fell asleep. Not because I thought anyone would read it. Not because I was making something. I wrote because it was the only way I could put the day down somewhere outside my own body long enough to sleep for four hours and get up and do it again.

Every one of those nights was purely selfish. Survival is selfish, and it should be. You don’t owe anyone a lesson while you’re in it.

But the pages kept. And years later, they turned out to be useful to somebody else.

That’s not redemption. Nothing redeems Ken’s death. It’s just what happened. The worst thing in my life became, eventually, something I could hand to a stranger—or to a friend standing in a hospital parking lot at midnight—and say: here. I don’t have anything that fixes this. But I’ve been where you are, and I wrote it down so you’d know the trails you’re walking on have been tread on before.

That’s the whole job, I think. That’s the only thing a grief book can honestly promise.

Not that it gets better. Not that there’s a lesson at the end.

Just: someone else has been here. You are not the first. You will not be the last. And the fact that you can still feel this much means you loved somebody enormously, and that is not a wound to be closed.

I typed a reply to my friend—eventually. It took me three tries, and it wasn’t very good.

Then I told Hudson it was time we finished our loop, and the sun was doing that late-afternoon thing where everything goes gold and slightly unbearable, and I thought about a man I’ve met once only briefly who is running out of time, and about the people who love him, and about how in a few weeks or months they’ll each be holding a copy of a book I wrote in the dark.

I hope it helps. That’s all any of us can do with what we carry—hand it forward, and hope it holds someone up.

I had to write the book.

Now I know why.

Ron Stempkowski is the author of The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories That Shape Us, a memoir-in-essays about learning to move with grief instead of moving on. If this story resonated, you can grab a signed copy—complete with a handwritten note—at ronstempkowski.com, or get your copy wherever books are sold. And if you'd like more stories like this one, join the journey and get them straight in your inbox.

Or follow here on Substack…

I got an email on Friday evening. It was the day after my author event at my library, so I was already flying high. As the week slowed down and Hudson and I could spend a quiet evening on the couch, this email filled me with so many good things.

The email came from a man who was a stranger to me, though it turns out not entirely. He’d donated to kenan derson’s My Foot Left 60th Birthday Fundraiser that I put together in honor of this milestone birthday last year, and I’d written back to thank him, the way I’ve written back to everyone. What I got in return was not a “you’re welcome” and nothing more. What I got was a story.

Years ago, someone took him to see Ken’s one-man show, My Foot Left. He can’t remember her name now—”getting old no fun,” he wrote, which made me laugh out loud alone in my kitchen, because that’s exactly the kind of line Ken would have repeated for a week. But he remembers the show. He remembers standing around afterward, talking to Ken. He remembers being in awe of him.

Then he told me he’d very recently been diagnosed with cancer.

He’d been talking with his sister about Ken’s show—reaching backward, I think, the way we all do when the ground goes out from under us, grabbing for something that once made us feel like the world was survivable. And in the middle of that conversation, he found the link I’d included in my thank-you to watch Ken’s show on my website. He watched it. He sent it to his other sister, hoping it might help her understand what he’s facing.

I’ve read his email probably a dozen times.

Here’s what I keep circling back to.

Ken died in June of 2011. He performed that show ten years before that. The man who wrote to me watched it once, in a theater, a decade ago, and then went on with his life—jobs, dinners, Tuesdays, the whole unremarkable accumulation of a life. And then one day the floor gave way, and of all the things his mind could have reached for, it reached for Ken.

That’s not nothing. That’s not a nice story I’m telling myself to feel better. A man got the worst news of his life and thought about my husband.

Ken had been living with cancer since he was fourteen. He lost his leg to it. He beat it, then beat it again, then beat it again, and then he didn’t. He made a show out of it—a funny one, a show with a pun in the title, because, of course, it had a pun in the title. He built an entire hour out of the thing that was going to kill him and made a room full of strangers laugh about it.

I ran the lights and sound for that show. Badly. I had no business anywhere near a light board. But he asked, and I said yes, because that’s what happened when Ken asked you for something.

I didn’t understand then what we were making. I thought we were putting on a show. I thought it was an evening. It turns out we were building something that would still be doing its job fifteen years after he stopped breathing—something that would find a frightened man in the worst week of his life and hand him a little courage.

People sometimes ask me, gently, whether all this—the writing, the book, the fundraiser, the endless returning to him—is a way of not letting go. Whether at some point the healthy thing is to close the door.

I understand the question. For a long time I asked it of myself, usually at three in the morning.

But I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. Letting go implies there’s something to release, that Ken is a weight I’m carrying up a hill. He isn’t. He’s more like a skill I picked up. He’s in how I talk to people. He’s in the fact that I say yes to things that terrify me. He’s in a stranger’s inbox doing work I had nothing to do with.

I’ve said before that grief isn’t about moving on—it’s about moving with. This is what I mean by that, in the most literal way I can point to. The person is gone. The effect is not. The effect keeps propagating outward, hitting people you’ll never meet, in years you won’t see.

You don’t get to schedule that. You don’t get to know when it’ll happen. All you can do is keep the door open—keep the link up, keep telling the stories, keep answering the emails—so that when someone comes looking, there’s something there to find.

I wrote back to the man who emailed me. I offered him a copy of my book, with a warning attached, because the book goes places he may not want to go right now, and he gets to decide that for himself. Either decision is the right one.

But I keep thinking about his sisters. Two women who never met Ken, who are about to watch a man they’ve never heard of talk about losing his leg, and who might come away understanding their brother a little better.

Fifteen years gone, and he’s still working the room.

Lights up. Sound on.

Watch Ken’s show, My Foot Left.

Ron Stempkowski is the author of The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories That Shape Us, a memoir-in-essays about learning to move with grief instead of moving on. If this story resonated, you can grab a signed copy—complete with a handwritten note—at ronstempkowski.com, or get your copy wherever books are sold. And if you'd like more stories like this one, join the journey and get them straight in your inbox.

Or follow here on Substack…

I’ve spent a lot of hours in the Park Ridge Public Library that had nothing to do with being a writer. Hauling boxes. Sorting donations. Calling out prices over the rustle of paper bags and the low murmur of people who understand the quiet magic of a used book. The sales are one of my favorite weekends of the year. They’re also the reason I know most of…

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This year has been…something. Actually, it’s been a lot of things.

Incredible highs with the release of my debut memoir, The Luck We Carry, about loving and losing my incredible husband, Ken, with the realization I haven’t lost him…not all of him. Not the really important parts.

And then the mass layoff. I can’t really call it a low, because I was deepl…

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I posted this video of Ken walking with his prosthetic the other day. I was really proud of it—really proud of him, actually. I remember leaving work at noon twice a week to meet him at the prosthetist’s office to watch him learn to walk with a computerized leg. It was a miracle to behold after the previous year of cancer diagnosis, radical hemipelvecto…

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Ken lost his leg below the knee when he was fourteen. Cancer. By the time I met him in 2001, the prosthetic was so fully absorbed into who he was that he used it as a punchline—detaching it in a crowded bar on our first real conversation so he could literally put his foot in his mouth.

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I don’t know why it took me so long. I’ve seen this training advertised on the socials for a year or so, and I’d pause, then move on. Last week, I didn’t move on. I stopped.

And I registered for the training.

Grief has played a big role in my life—only because love has played an even bigger one. Or maybe they’re equal. I’ve lived inside it for so long and worked so hard to understand it—to translate it into something I can take meaning from. I almost felt “called” to take this certification in a way that I’ve never experienced before. There was a kind of resolve to the decision. Unexpected, but it felt so right.

More importantly, grief plays a role in most everyone’s life—whether or not they choose to acknowledge it. Though a challenging topic, grief shouldn’t be off limits in everyday life. Because it is everyday life.

Though I earned the certification, I’m still reviewing and metabolizing the course content and looking for additional training and learning resources. This training was deep, detailed, and fascinating as I recognized so many of my own experiences as grief work was discussed. I remember what it felt like to be seen—truly seen—while I was grieving Ken.

Maybe that was the beginning.

I think people just want to be seen—particularly when they’re dealing with something challenging and doing their level best to handle it. Most of us aren’t born with the tools to navigate the complexities that often accompany grief. And though I certainly don’t have all the answers, I’ve lived my own grief experience and worked so hard to understand its (unfortunately) necessary role in our lives.

So, this fall, I’m launching grief coaching to help people navigating loss and grief and all that goes along with it. As I said above, I feel called to do this work. It’s a natural pull, hence the title of this article. I considered calling it “Circling the Grief Drain.” Though I like the turn of phrase, the image isn’t terribly enticing.

Stay tuned for more updates as I get things ready.

In the meantime, check out The Luck We Carry audiobook!

Ron Stempkowski is the author of The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories That Shape Us, a memoir-in-essays about learning to move with grief instead of moving on. If this story resonated, you can grab a signed copy—complete with a handwritten note—at ronstempkowski.com, or get your copy wherever books are sold. And if you'd like more stories like this one, join the journey and get them straight in your inbox.

Or follow here on Substack…

I’m grateful to be able to say I’ve experienced author events both as the author and as a festival-goer. Both are thrilling! There’s a particular kind of tired that comes after a good author event—not the flat, drained kind, but the full kind. The kind where your feet hurt and your voice is a little hoarse from talking, and somehow you still want to kee…

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I’ve started the coursework for a grief support practitioner certification.

Grief isn’t something people volunteer to learn. You learn it because you have to, and eventually—if you’re paying attention—it teaches you something. I’ve spent a long time inside it. Long enough to know it isn’t something you graduate from. It’s something you carry, and carrying it well is its own kind of skill.

Lately I’ve felt called toward this work. Not a lightning bolt—more like a door I kept walking past finally staying open long enough for me to notice it.

I want to be clear: this isn’t me positioning myself as a bereavement counselor or psychologist. That’s my dear friend Claire Bidwell Smith’s lane, and she’s brilliant at it. I’m building something adjacent—a support role, a companion role, which fits everything I believe about moving with grief rather than past it.

Writing has always been how I process the unprocessable. It’s how I stayed connected to Ken while losing him, and to myself since. If that helped me, I believe it can be shaped into something that helps others too—through the page, through this certification, maybe through workshops down the line.

I don’t have the whole plan. But I’m excited to learn, and to see where this leads.

Follow along as it unfolds.

Onward.

Ron Stempkowski is the author of The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories That Shape Us, a memoir-in-essays about learning to move with grief instead of moving on. If this story resonated, you can grab a signed copy—complete with a handwritten note—at ronstempkowski.com, or get your copy wherever books are sold. And if you'd like more stories like this one, join the journey and get them straight in your inbox.

Or follow here on Substack…

Thanks to Ken’s influence, it’s my third year of a little raised garden bed where I mostly grow herbs, though this year, I did plant a kind of pepper—if I could only remember what kind. 🤷🏼‍♂️

He grew all kinds of things in a little garden behind our apartment on the north side of Chicago—squash, tomatoes, green beans, and more that I can’t remember. His thumb was so naturally green. But it makes complete sense because he was a nurturer of things: people, pets, plants.

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I’ve never been great at asking for things.

Ask me to tell a story about the night Ken detached his prosthetic leg mid-conversation, no problem. Ask me to stand up in a theater full of people and get through the soirée we planned together for his memorial without falling apart, I can do that too—barely, but I did it. But ask me to say "hey, would you pay me for this?" and suddenly I'm twenty-five again, working two jobs and still not sure I deserve either paycheck.

So this is me, working up the nerve.

Starting this week, The Ronaissance will have a paid tier. Not every post will be paid, but the ones I spend more time on. There’s going to be more, for the people who want to go deeper with me, and I want to tell you honestly why, instead of just sliding a button into the blog and hoping nobody asks.

Here’s the truth: I spent years writing for other people for paychecks. Corporate comms, other people’s voices, other people’s priorities—dressed up as mine. It paid the bills. It also quietly starved the part of me that first fell in love with a blue Pilot ballpoint pen and a stenography pad at 13. When I finally stepped away from that world to write full-time, I didn’t step into a salary. I stepped into the deep end.

Writing “The Luck We Carry” wasn’t a hobby I did on the side. It was—still is—the thing I built a life around after I lost the person I built my first life around. Turning that into an actual career, one that supports me the way corporate comms used to, means the writing itself has to be able to hold some weight. Not just emotionally. Financially, too.

That’s not a complaint. It’s just math, and I’d rather be honest about it than pretend a writing career runs on vibes.

But here’s the part I actually care about more: a paid tier isn’t just about keeping the lights on. It’s about what I can give you when the meter’s not always running toward “free and skimmable.” Some stories need room to breathe that a free weekly post doesn’t have. Deeper craft breakdowns on how I actually turn a memory into an essay. Real talk about the audiobook process, the querying process, the “yes, self-publishing is genuinely hard and here’s what nobody tells you” process. First access to a new projeect as it comes together. And more, as I figure it out.

Moving with grief, not moving on, was never supposed to be a marketing line. It’s the whole philosophy—that we don’t leave what shaped us behind, we build forward with it. I feel the same way about this blog. I’m not leaving the free version behind. I’m building something alongside it, for the people who want to walk a little further into the process with me.

If that’s you, I’d be honored. If it’s not, you’re not going anywhere, and neither is the free stuff.

Ken used to say right now is all we’re guaranteed. He said yes to things that terrified him constantly—a one-man show, a hemipelvectomy, a tattoo in the weeks before I died—because waiting for the fear to go away was never really an option.

So: yes. This is my version of tugging my ear at the dartboard, hoping someone I trust is watching, ready to help me pull this off.

Thanks for being here—free, paid, or just lurking with your coffee. Truly. It’s what I love doing.

Ron Stempkowski is the author of The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories That Shape Us, a memoir-in-essays about learning to move with grief instead of moving on. If this story resonated, you can grab a signed copy—complete with a handwritten note—at ronstempkowski.com, or get your copy wherever books are sold. And if you'd like more stories like this one, join the journey and get them straight in your inbox.

Or follow here on Substack…

I met her at one of our library book sales—one of my favorite weekends of the year, the kind that hums with the particular chaos of people who love stories. She was tiny, the kind of frail that makes you want to carry everything for her, which I did, out to her car, a small tower of books balanced in my arms.

She said it so plainly I almost missed it. “I don’t understand why some people are so lucky. I’ve had three heart attacks, diabetes, and cancer.”

She wasn’t bitter. That’s the part I keep coming back to. There was no edge in it, no self-pity. She was just noticing—the way you’d notice weather, or the time. A quiet accounting of what her body had survived, set against some idea of a life that hadn’t asked as much of other people.

I’ve thought about that conversation for a long time. Longer than the two minutes it took to load her trunk.

For most of my life, I thought luck meant being spared. The people who didn’t get the diagnosis. The people who didn’t have to watch someone they loved disappear one piece at a time. Luck was the absence of the thing you feared.

I don’t think that anymore.

Ken taught me—is still teaching me, all these years later— that luck is something stranger and more demanding than that. It’s the willingness to love someone all the way, fully knowing what it will eventually cost you. It’s surviving that cost and finding your tenderness still intact on the other side, not calloused over, not walled off. It’s understanding, really understanding, that the joy and the sorrow were never two separate things you could pick between. They were always the same thing, asking different questions.

The grief I carry is exactly proportional to the love I had. I’ve made my peace with that math. I wouldn’t trade one to be free of the other — not for a second, not on the hardest days.

So that’s the luck we carry. All of us. Every person reading this. The luck of having loved someone enough to grieve them. The luck of still being here, still breathing, still able to tell the story.

I made a video about this—the talk I give when I share The Luck We Carry with readers. I’ll drop it below.

Ron Stempkowski is the author of The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories That Shape Us, a memoir-in-essays about learning to move with grief instead of moving on. If this story resonated, you can grab a signed copy—complete with a handwritten note—at ronstempkowski.com, or get your copy wherever books are sold. And if you'd like more stories like this one, join the journey and get them straight in your inbox.

Or follow here on Substack…

I’ve written a lot about how I’ve been journaling since I was 13. But it occurred to me when I was writing The Luck We Carry that writing has done a lot of heavy lifting in my life. When I was thinking about an essay from the book, “A Letter from the Future,” where I’d written myself a letter to give me some hope at a time I desperately needed it, a memory played in my head. It was right after I got the phone call that my grandmother had died, and I rushed to the desk in my bedroom and frantically wrote a letter to heaven, explaining what a wonderful woman she was and how much I loved her and all the reasons I did. It felt imperative—crucial—for me to write this letter as soon as I heard the news—as if it needed to get there before she did, and somehow make things easier for her.

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It’s not glamorous. Hearing your own voice played back never sounds like you—remember old answering machines, when you’d think, “Is that really what I sound like?” I’ve decided this deserves a name. Vocal dysmorphia. Steal it if you need it.

Hudson wandered in partway through to investigate the noise. Moral support, or snacks. Unclear.

But underneath the cringe: this is the last real step before the audiobook goes out into the world, on Audible and beyond. Which means more people get to sit with Ken’s story in whatever way works for them—read, or listened to, in the car, on a walk, in the dark.

Also coming soon: my book talk video (the one I give at signings) is headed to YouTube, likely by early next week. Newsletter subscribers will see it first. Subscribe below!

Back to listening to myself. Wish me luck.

Ron Stempkowski is the author of The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories That Shape Us, a memoir-in-essays about learning to move with grief instead of moving on. If this story resonated, you can grab a signed copy—complete with a handwritten note—at ronstempkowski.com, or get your copy wherever books are sold. And if you'd like more stories like this one, join the journey and get them straight in your inbox.

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The other thing occupying my afternoon is a video I’ve been editing—the book talk I give when I do signings for The Luck We Carry. It includes some of the readings I do live, and it’s meant to give people a real sense of what’s inside the book beyond the jacket copy. I’ve wanted to get this up for a while, and it should land on YouTube early next week.

Hope your holiday is easy and unhurried, wherever you are.

Ron Stempkowski is the author of The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories That Shape Us, a memoir-in-essays about learning to move with grief instead of moving on. If this story resonated, you can grab a signed copy—complete with a handwritten note—at ronstempkowski.com, or get your copy wherever books are sold. And if you'd like more stories like this one, join the journey and get them straight in your inbox.

When I met him at a neighborhood bar, sparks flying between us, I had no idea he was wearing a prosthetic. In long pants, he was just a handsome, funny flirt. When he introduced me to his surprise prosthetic, he didn’t flinch. And, to my surprise, neither did I. He was surrounded by an outline of glitter. He sparkled. And he sparkled most when he looked at me. (If I sparkled, I’m sure the show was prettiest when I looked at him.)

Throughout our decade together, I saw him do something every single day that I didn’t have to do. He had to fight. He had to work harder than anyone to live and to move, refusing to be defined by what he didn’t have. He often said his day mimicked the evolution of man: in the morning, he crawled to the coffee machine, then the shower, where he hopped on one foot, maintaining his balance until finally putting on his prosthetic to become bipedal. Relying on one knee for so long took its toll. I heard the cracks; saw the pained pursing of lips; the exhaustion that overtook him some evenings when falling into bed.

But he got up and did the same thing the next day. And the next. And the next. How easy my life felt compared to his. How guilty I felt for feeling like I had any hardships that compared. How much it hurt to see him when he struggled—which in all honesty, wasn’t often. And how very much he did not need or appreciate pity. So, along with the love for him that grew every day, so did my respect.

When his cancer returned, we hoped a radical hemipelvectomy would have done what his teenage amputation had done: buy us a decade or more. He endured an invasive surgery that offered no guarantees, but three weeks later—less his entire left leg and pelvis—he was up and at ‘em with a walker. He was a Weeble. He wobbled, but he never fell down.

He pushed forward with incredible focus, intention, and humor. It’s what anyone who knew him came to expect of him. He was the embodiment of resilience. He taught me so much just by being and living fully as himself. When times get tough in my life, he’s still the beacon I look to because his glitter still sparkles.

Ron Stempkowski is the author of The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories That Shape Us, a memoir-in-essays about learning to move with grief instead of moving on. If this story resonated, you can grab a signed copy—complete with a handwritten note—at ronstempkowski.com, or get your copy wherever books are sold. And if you'd like more stories like this one, join the journey and get them straight in your inbox.

My book, The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories that Shape Us, exists because of a promise.

Ken was full of kindness, grace, and humor. So much so that even our hospice experience together held moments of joy. Not because it was easy. It wasn’t. We had hard conversations. Honest ones. The kind you’re grateful for later. I have no regrets. I got t…

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