It was one thing to sit with my friend Kathy and fill out our Second City Improv Training Center applications and mail them in, but it was another thing entirely to be sitting in the lobby of the iconic Second City at 1616 N. Wells in Old Town, Chicago, waiting for our names to be called. The former was energizing; the latter was terrifying.

But I did it. Well, we did it because, as I’ve told her in the intervening years, I wouldn’t have done it without her. And I left that two-year program with life experience and the ability to get on stage with no idea what I would do or say (for better or, more likely, for worse). It wasn’t that I was good, or even that I needed to be. It was that I was doing it. I did it. I did something people talk about but actually do.

And, most powerfully, I left with deep-rooted, robust friendships that have endured for decades. And, inevitably, when we get together, we talk about those days, the scenes we created, the agony of not quite getting it, and the ecstasy of that feeling when you “nailed it,” if even for only a few seconds. I remember that feeling. And I hold it close. Because it’s another lesson. I didn’t need to have huge wins. Tiny wins count just as much.

So, when we found out that one of our group would be visiting from Los Angeles in October, we set out to gather old friends together. And, it didn’t disappoint! Everyone gathered at my house on Sunday evening to hang out on the patio, talk, catch up, and laugh.

We recounted the same stories we always recount when any combination of us are together. Experiencing something so unique really bonds you together. I don’t like war analogies, but when you’re on stage, it’s just you and your scene partner trying to survive! You are each other’s only hope of doing so. And that kind of rigor builds trust and friendship.

The evening’s weather was perfection until late evening when the fire table was turned on so light flickered across 9 laughing faces until each one of us peeled off to go home, leaving me with the two out-of-towners who were spending the night at my place.

Once I saw them both off on Monday morning, I’ve spent the rest of the week drifting back to moments from Sunday—and even further back. Connection is so important to me. I’ve never been someone with a lot of friends—mostly a small group of people who just “fit.”

On stage, the first rule is to make your partner look good. Say yes. Build on what they give you. Somewhere along the way, those rules stopped being about scenes and started being about us. Decades later, we’re still saying yes to each other: to a Sunday on the patio, to the same old stories, to showing up. I didn’t know that’s what I was signing up for when Kathy and I mailed those applications. I’m so glad we did.

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 my husband Ken was diagnosed with terminal cancer, I began a journey that felt like climbing a mountain I didn’t know existed—and there was no way around it. Certainly unexpected. Incredibly challenging. At times, it just felt wholly impossible. But I did it. Because I had no choice. With no time to plan, I grabbed on where I could—even if it was just a pinprick of an outcropping—enduring the emotional cuts, bruises, and hopelessness I sometimes felt along the way because I had to be with him. I had to support and love him. Until he no longer needed me. Until he was no longer suffering. I would be his escort, guardian, and protector—no one else. Though I sometimes accepted the hands of those who offered them on the climb, I usually swatted them away, determined to escort him on my own.

It was only a couple of days before Thanksgiving that year when Ken’s doctor gave us the news: his cancer had returned. And it wouldn’t be the last time in the next year and a half. The ground rumbled below, and a swell of earthen angst rose before me, though it didn’t seem that big. And it wasn’t—at first. But as remedies failed to stop cancer’s onslaught, the mountain’s peak shot into the clouds. I couldn’t see it anymore. I just saw a long journey into darkness with no hope of light to guide me.

I wasn’t equipped for this journey, but there was no turning back. Ken’s and my relationship embodied what I’d always dreamed of—a partnership in love, life, family, and creativity. In the ten years we spent together, he was my rock, cheerleader, and best friend. So, when the person I loved and relied on the most was slowly being stolen from me, I had to steel myself. And I had to learn to climb by climbing.

We’d made other climbs together before. Smaller ones: he’d had some minor injuries and surgeries before, and we’d climbed together in perfect sync. This time would be no different, I hoped. We’d begin this climb together—hand in hand—but only I would be returning home. Alone, broken, and defeated. Though I couldn’t change the outcome, there were things I could do to make the climb meaningful—to make my choices meaningful: by remaining present, acknowledging my feelings, and resolving to take time on this journey in seconds and minutes. Not months or years. Or lifetimes. It was during this early part of the climb when I began to find joy in tiny moments; those infinitesimal nothings that pass by quickly, but with experience in loss, can fill up your reserves in an instant with gratitude you don’t have to look hard to find. A smile. Laughter. A perfect beautiful flower. Solace in things I used to have the luxury of taking for granted.

No one welcomes grief’s climb. He’s an intruder. An interloper who arrives at the scene of chaos to both gloat and foreshadow—a confusing combination. I’d caught a glimpse of grief from time to time as I pulled myself up the mountain. He was always there in the corner of my eye, but I never acknowledged him. In fact, I reviled him. And I raged against him—in my thoughts and words of anger that scorched the pages of my sacred journals. I hated him. And I would never let him defeat me. Grief was my enemy. He had declared war on Ken and me, and I was prepared to do whatever I could to fight it. I’d find a way to defeat it. I’d be the first.

Deep inside, a part of me was more prepared for this journey than I could have ever thought. As a child of the 70s, I learned a lot about quicksand from television. The murky mud-water was so prevalent on my weeknight lineup I assumed my adult life would be fraught with quicksand confrontations. But, also thanks to TV, I learned how to get out of quicksand: by not fighting it—that only made you sink faster. It was by relaxing and eventually getting thrown a vine to pull yourself out that you could escape its gluey grasp.

Turns out, dealing with the climb of grief has a lot in common with dealing with sinking in quicksand. At some point in my journey, I stopped struggling against grief. For me, a big part of that meant becoming transparent in my feelings about Ken’s illness and impending death. I figured that grief could pass right through me if it couldn’t see me. It would have nothing to impact or ricochet off to gain momentum. I understood that acceptance was my invisibility cloak, of sorts. Ken was my only focus. I didn’t want to waste time dreading a future without him. I had the rest of my life to deal with that, and I wouldn’t waste what was left of Ken’s on it.

As soon as we embarked on this climb, I understood my role clearly without anyone telling me. My sole responsibility was to climb with Ken, knowing when to help him and—more importantly—knowing when not to. When I think of those final nine weeks of our climb during hospice care in our home, I smile. Despite the obstacles we encountered, our journey was filled with incredible joy. And laughter. And peace—because of Ken’s resoluteness and grace. There is absolutely no doubt that he led us on the climb all the way to the summit—as if he knew the way. It was so easy to follow him. Ken left a wake of hope, possibility, and humor wherever he went—even on this—his last journey.

On a climb as grueling as this one, resting was an essential part of the journey. For both of us. I stayed up until Ken was asleep, grateful he could rest up for the next day’s climb. While he slept, I wrote, documenting our journey and my feelings before I closed my eyes for the night—an essential part of my self-care and sanity. Sleep had been no friend to me during those weeks and months. With nothing to focus on but my thoughts, rest slipped further and further away. How was I going to live my life without him? I had no idea.

I wrote non-stop during those late-night hours. Prolifically. In these sessions, as I clicked on the keyboard in my journal or blog, I found incredible comfort. It’s when I first began to get a true understanding of the thoughts and feelings that were swirling around me, and how I could interpret or mitigate them enough in my daily life to ensure I could serve Ken and love him to my greatest capacity until he drew his last breath—a weighty proposition for anyone. I poured my heart into my blogs and took willing readers along with me on the journey I’d most unwillingly embarked upon.

It was those moments of truth and vulnerability where I cast my greatest fears and darkest thoughts into the ether of the internet that washed back on me a great calm and feeling of connection to something much bigger—much more important—than my situation. It was my reward, of sorts, for being open and telling my story. It became a habit because it felt so good.

The final days of the climb were the hardest. Ken was no longer verbal. No longer himself. As if parts of him were slowly evaporating. On the final part of the climb, I carried him to the summit. It was a part of the journey I had dreaded the most, but the part where my resolve had to be as strong as Ken’s had been to get us this far. Upon reaching the finish line I never wanted to reach, Ken was gone. He’d made a heroic climb and had been rewarded with being freed from a body I loved dearly, but that ultimately failed him.

For one single split second, the beauty of the summit was dazzling. In that brief flash of a moment, all things seemed possible somehow. Everything made sense. I had a deep understanding of life and death that vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Even the memory of it faded before I could understand it.

Not only had the journey up the mountain been punishing, but I had yet another climb to make—down the other side of it. And I knew the journey wouldn’t be the same as the first part. It would be lonelier. All of us left standing on that summit without Ken for the first time had our own journeys to make. Each would be different. And each would be arduous.

As I contemplated the next part of the journey, I took comfort in the lessons I’d learned on the way up to the summit. I was better prepared for this next part than I had been for the first. And before I took my first step down, a hand was offered to me. This time, it was grief offering me his hand. Gently. Kindly. And I took it. Steadfastly.

Grief escorted me down the mountain. It protected me—sometimes by overwhelming me with my feelings so I couldn’t focus on any one of them. And sometimes, it dulled the senses that had to be razor-sharp while I was shepherding Ken up the climb. It gave me tunnel vision to focus on one simple thing at a time. Grief turned out to be something I hadn’t expected. It’s a shapeshifter. Something helpful and good.

Grief also gave me permission to express how I was feeling and provided distraction when I had nothing to say. On that journey down the mountain, I learned grief could fill an empty room, when necessary, as much as it can make a crowded one feel utterly desolate and bare. It’s powerful. And I think it was designed to help me navigate this time of great change—of great loss. It taught me to open up when I needed to listen to what it was saying—because one of the greatest lessons I learned on the climb down was that grief will not be ignored.

The landscape eventually flattened as I descended the other side of that mountain. Walking further and further from it, all I see now when I turn around is beauty, accomplishment…and reverence for every step of that grueling, heartbreaking—and rewarding—journey. I learned so much while I climbed that unforgiving mountain. I learned the truth about Ken and me: we were exactly who we thought we were to each other. Until the very end—and even now, all these years later. I showed up for Ken every day as best I could until the man I loved drew his last breath. It’s the greatest gift I could ever hope to give him. And I’ll be forever grateful for that.

I’ve climbed more mountains of grief in my life, but none as seemingly insurmountable as the one I climbed with—and for—Ken. When my father died seven years later, the mountain again rose before me. But this time, it wasn’t a craggy vertical wall I had to climb; it was a steep incline I could walk. And I could see the outline of a path that had been used in the past. Maybe by others before me. Maybe by me. And it allowed me to help steady my mother and sisters as much as I could on our journey together.

Because I’m a mountain climber.

This essay was placed in the top 10 for the 2023 Writer’s Digest Annual Writing Competition. An abbreviated version appears in my memoir, The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories that Shape Us, available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook.

© Ron Stempkowski 2023

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.

I wrote this four days before Ken died.

I didn’t know that when I sat down to write it. I knew he was sleeping more. I knew I had his mom back in town to watch over him with me. What I didn’t know was how close we already were to the edge.

Reading it now, fifteen years later, I’m struck less by what I was losing than by what I was noticing—a pair of purple socks, a playlist with terrible timing, an empty lot on Lincoln Avenue that was a metaphor that I found terribly upsetting.

May 28, 2011

Ken has been sleeping more and more, and my keyboard clicks away; he has been sleeping 15+ hours. My mother-in-law (Mama Jo) arrived on Thursday evening after a few conversations updating her and the rest of the family in California about the recent changes I’ve noticed in Ken’s condition. It was a big relief for me to have her here. Not only have these changes necessitated more energy and greater patience than ever before, but aside from that, I wanted someone else’s eyes on the situation and on him. Maybe the changes I’ve noticed weren’t as drastic as I was thinking? Maybe I’m the one who is growing more and more confused? With his nuclear family so far away, I felt the great responsibility of keeping them up to date on changes in his condition. It was nerve-racking wondering if it was time to call them to come to Chicago. Or now? Or now? Now?

Because of my co-caregiver, I had the opportunity to take a walk today. The last one I took was mentioned in another blog about a month ago—with a house full of guests and Ken, the director of all the organized chaos. Today I was getting itchy. With him sleeping more, there isn’t much to do. Though I can sometimes dive into a project and stay distracted, today wasn’t one of those days. Though the skies looked ever-threatening as they have so often this dreary spring, I headed out for my familiar two-mile route.

What a delight that most of my iPod selections were about true love, being adrift without it, and the tragedy of love lost. Thinking about the confusion Ken has experienced lately propelled me into a public display of “ugly cry.” But I went with it, hard-blinking the tears out of my eyes while trying to keep up a rapid clip. At that point, it became more of a challenge. How fast can I walk while my eyelids squeegee the saline away? Good job, subconscious!

I’m overwhelmed. No doubt about it. Luckily, it’s rare that I can fully grasp the grand, sprawling scope of the situation. Some kind of safety valve in my brain shuts down attempts after a certain period of time. Yet there are occasions even my ever-churning brain can’t protect me from. Yesterday he threw me for quite a loop as I was putting away laundry. He called me into the living room to his bed. I was carrying his boxers and various colored socks to put away where they belong in his bathroom.

“Remind me to talk to you about socks,” he said.

Based on his recent confusion, memory problems and hallucinations, I thought we should get to it. “Let’s talk about it now,” I chirped, smiling down at him.

“The purple ones,” he said, pointing to the purple knee socks with white horizontal strips and “grippies” on the bottom, jumbled in my hands.

“What about the purple socks?” I asked.

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She got there before me and had already bought my coffee.

I like starting there because it tells you a lot. I was the one who’d extended the invitation. I was the one who supposedly had something to offer. And I walked up to her, sitting at a table outside, to find a cup already waiting for me, and a woman who had thought far enough ahead to guess what I…

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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 t…

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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, t…

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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…

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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 de…

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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…