The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories that Shape Us

Ron Stempkowski met his husband Ken on a cold Chicago night in a neighborhood bar—only to fall for him a second time, two months later, in the same bar. It was the kind of meet-cute that felt like the beginning of everything. Ten years in, it was.

Then came the second cancer diagnosis. Then the wheelchair. Then a "soirée" instead of a funeral—because Ken, dying, still had notes on the guest list.

The Luck We Carry moves through the full arc of that love story: the improbable romance, the caregiving, the 3 a.m. hospital vigils, and the strange, funny, unglamorous work of surviving what comes after—an Ambien-fueled vampire scare, a lentil-studded pie crust, a box labeled "Relics." Told in personal essays that are as wickedly funny as they are devastating, this is a book about what it actually looks like to keep living after the worst has happened—not by moving on, but by moving with the person you lost, letting them walk beside you into whatever comes next.

With a foreword by grief therapist and bestselling author Claire Bidwell Smith, and read by Stempkowski himself, The Luck We Carry is for anyone who has loved—and lost—enough to understand that grief isn't the opposite of luck. It's the price of it, and if you're lucky, you pay it.

© 2026 Ron Stempkowski (Audiobook): 9798994185650

Release date

Audiobook: 15 July 2026