I don’t know her name. I never will.
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.
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