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.
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