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.

I still have it—tucked among a small stack of cards, notes, and scraps of paper Ken gave me over the years. Most of them have softened at the edges from handling. This one has too. It’s not fancy. It’s the kind of card you’d find sitting in a little wire holder on a bar, next to the swizzle sticks and matchbooks, meant for nothing more than jotting down a phone number or a tab.

Ken used it for something else.

We were early in whatever we were becoming—not quite a couple yet, but close enough that I already knew I wanted to be one. We were sitting at Scot’s, a little neighborhood bar in Ravenswood that’s long gone now, replaced by something new , the way bars in Chicago tend to be. I don’t recall what we were talking about. I remember the low hum of the room, the particular ease of sitting next to him, the sense that time had quietly rearranged itself around us.

At some point, without much fanfare, he reached over, pulled a card from the holder, and started writing. I watched him do it—the concentration on his face, the small smile he couldn’t quite keep off it—and had no idea what he was up to. Then he slid it across the bar to me.

An invitation. Dinner at Café 28, a Cuban spot down the street, bustling and loud and full of the kind of energy Ken loved. He’d written something close to a question, though it read more like a foregone conclusion. That was Ken.

I said yes, obviously.

What strikes me now, looking at that card, is how small the gesture was and how enormous it turned out to be. He didn’t propose the moment on a napkin scrawled with poetry. He didn’t make some grand declaration. He just used what was in front of him—a bar card, a stub of a pencil—to ask for more time together. And somehow that’s exactly what made it land. It wasn’t a performance. It was just Ken, being direct about wanting something, the same way he’d be direct about most things for the rest of his life.

I think about that a lot now—how the beginning of a relationship gives you a preview of its whole shape, if you’re paying attention. Ken was never someone who waited for the right moment. He made the moment right by simply showing up in it, fully, without hedging. That card is proof of that instinct. He saw something he wanted—more time with me—and he didn’t overthink how to ask for it. He just did.

There’s a particular kind of grief that comes with objects like this. Not the big grief, the kind that flattens you, but a quieter one—the grief of holding something so ordinary that once meant nothing and realizing it now means almost everything. A bar card. A napkin. A parking receipt with a joke written on the back. These things weren’t precious when they were made. They became precious because he’s gone and they’re not.

I’ve kept every card and note Ken ever gave me, even the silly ones, even the ones that don’t say much beyond “pick up milk” or “you looked great tonight.” I used to think I kept them because I was sentimental. Now I think I kept them because some part of me already knew they’d become evidence—proof that a whole life happened, that a person loved me specifically and in his own specific way, in a bar that no longer exists, at a restaurant that no longer exists, in a version of Chicago that only exists now in memory and in boxes like the one where this card lives.

Writing about Ken, I’ve learned, isn’t really about preserving what happened. It’s about noticing what would otherwise dissolve. The big events of our life together—his diagnosis, his death, the soiree, the years after—those stay vivid on their own; they carved themselves into me. But the small things need tending. A card slid across a bar. That needs someone to write it down, or it disappears the way Scot’s did, the way Café 28 did, the way so much of that era of my life has quietly vanished from the map of the city, even if it never left the map of me.

The full story of that night—the bar, the darts, the friend in the Armani suit who never stood a chance—lives in “The Meet Cute,” the opening essay of The Luck We Carry. This card is where it starts. If you want the rest of it, it’s there waiting for you.

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.

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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If you don’t know Tickle Toes, it’s a Hasbro toy—discontinued now—shaped like a left foot. Sort of like Simon, but you tap the toes in sequence instead of pressing colored buttons. I put fresh batteries in and scored 210 in a row before I stopped. Old habits.

I’d forgotten I had it. That happens sometimes with the things Ken left behind. They disappear into closets and cabinets and basement coffee tables, and then one day you find them again, and the memory comes back fast and whole.

When Ken and I were living in Los Angeles, and he was going out on auditions, he found Tickle Toes on Amazon. He ordered them by the dozen—anytime they appeared in stock, he’d grab a batch, because they were already hard to find and he knew they wouldn’t last. Then he’d tape his business card to the bottom of each one.

After every audition, he’d leave one with the casting director.

It’s a left foot. Same side as his amputation.

He never tried to hide the difference. He leaned into it, every time, with humor and complete confidence. That was the whole point. He wasn’t asking anyone to overlook what made him unusual. He was handing it to them directly and saying: remember me.

They did. Everyone always did.

I’ve been playing Tickle Toes at the kitchen table for two days now. My friends don’t know what’s waiting for them on their next visit.

Some things you just can’t give away.

Ken is the heart of my memoir, The Luck We Carry. If you’d like a signed copy, you can find it here. And if this kind of story resonates, I’d love for you to join my newsletter—you can sign up here.

Now there are two more.

If you’re in the Chicago area and want to spend an hour in a room full of people who believe stories can save you, I’d love to see you:

📅 Saturday, June 6 · 1 p.m.
Barbara’s Bookstore at Hawthorne Mall · Vernon Hills

📅 Saturday, June 20 · 1 p.m.
Barbara’s Bookstore at Macy’s · Downtown Chicago

I’ll be reading from The Luck We Carry, answering questions, and signing books. Come say hi.

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/ronstempkowski

#TheLuckWeCarry #TwistedPlotPaper #ChicagoAuthor #MemoirWriter #IndieAuthor #GriefAndHealing #Bookstagram

Barbara’s Bookstore in Yorktown Center did an amazing job welcoming me and my book!

Saturday afternoon, I walk…

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The mantle above my fireplace holds two framed photographs and a greeting card propped between them.

On the left: a group of friends—the A-List we call ourselves because we started in Level A at Second City and went through the entire 2-year program from beginning to end together—laughing, arms around each other, the kind of photo where everyone looks ex…

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On March 23, 2026, I met up with some friends at Starbucks in my old neighborhood on the north side of Chicago. It was launch day for my book, The Luck We Carry, a memoir told in essays about my late husband Ken and our journey together through his cancer, and mine alone after he died. I wanted—needed—to put some goodness out into the world. Though the …

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I found out on the morning of March 31, at the same time as 30,000 of my fellow Oracle colleagues.

I’d gone to the gym in the morning. It was my last day of PTO. I’d taken the previous week off and the first two days of the next week off to work on the launch of my memoir, The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories that Shape Us. It’s a memoir I’d be…

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So many of you have sent the kindest notes since I shared about my layoff. And I’ve been sitting with all of it — grateful, really — thinking about where this steadiness actually comes from.

It comes from Ken. From walking beside him through something so much harder than a job ending.

From learning, in the middle of real loss, that anger is expensive and love is the better spend.

A layoff is a plot twist, not a finale. There’ll be another chapter. There always is.

If any of this resonates, it’s all in The Luck We Carry — link in bio or linktree below. 💙

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/ronstempkowski

#TheLuckWeCarry #GriefAndHealing #Perspective #MemoirWriter #IndieAuthor

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I’ve been rehearsing this moment in my head for a while now. Not the launch itself—the feeling I thought I’d have when it finally arrived. I imagined something cinematic. Maybe a swelling soundtrack. At minimum, a sense of profound certainty that I’d done something meaningful.

Instead, I woke up this morning, made coffee, and sat with Hudson for a few mi…

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I was interviewed recently about my upcoming book, The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories That Shape Us. I was a little nervous going in, but I kept talking myself down. What question could the host possibly ask me about the book that I couldn’t answer? I wrote it. That helped. Mostly.

But once the show started, none of that mattered. All I wante…

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