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 minutes before my brain fully caught up to the date.

March 23, 2026. Launch day.

And then the other thing hit me.

Twenty-five years ago today, on a cold Chicago night in early 2001, I walked two blocks to a little neighborhood bar and met a man with dark, wavy hair and a smile that could power the city grid. He was sitting alone, writing in a journal with a fountain pen. I slid his paper toward me and pretended to read it. His handwriting was completely indecipherable, but that wasn’t the point.

The point was Ken.

I’ve been a writer my whole life—journalist by training, journaler by obsession. I’ve kept notebooks since I was 13, scrawling on yellow stenography pads with a blue Pilot ballpoint pen like I was filing dispatches from my own interior. Writing has never felt optional for me. It’s just how I process being alive. But this book came from a different place than anything I’d written before. When Ken died, writing stopped being a craft and became something closer to oxygen. I didn’t sit down one day and decide to write a grief memoir. I sat down because I had no other way to hold what was happening to me. The pages filled up with all of it — the love, the loss, the absurd moments, the ones so tender I could barely look at them directly. And somewhere in all of that, a book took shape.

The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories That Shape Us is the result of years of that kind of writing. Essays about Ken — how we met, how we loved, how we navigated his terminal diagnosis with martinis and humor and a soirée we planned together even as he was slipping away. But it’s also essays about after. About the vampire incident (yes, there’s a vampire incident). About baking an apple pie and completely falling apart in the process. About a stranger at a library book sale who, without knowing it, handed me a new way of thinking about luck. It’s about what happens when you stop trying to move on from loss and learn — slowly, clumsily, sometimes hilariously — to move with it.

Here’s what I hope this book does for you: I hope it makes you feel less alone. That’s really it. Not less sad—grief doesn’t work that way, and I wouldn’t insult you by suggesting it does. But less alone inside it. Because here’s what I’ve learned after writing my way through all of this: the stories we carry about love and loss are more universal than we think. The details are different. The people are different. The specific flavor of heartbreak is entirely yours. But the experience of loving someone so much that losing them restructures your entire world? That’s not unique to me. That belongs to all of us.

If you’re in the middle of grief right now, I hope something in these pages finds you. If you’re on the other side of it, I hope this book gives language to what you’ve been through. And if you’re somewhere in between — which, let’s be honest, most of us are — I hope it makes you laugh at least once, because Ken would have absolutely insisted on that.

So here we are. Twenty-five years after a cold night in a neighborhood bar, and the story that began there is out in the world. The Luck We Carry is available now wherever books are sold — you can find all the ordering links at ronstempkowski.com. If you’re a book club, a grief support group, or just a human who likes to read and feel things, there’s also a reading guide available designed to spark real conversation—the kind Ken would have loved.

If you read it and something in it means something to you, I’d genuinely love to hear about it. Find me on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Substack. Tell me which essay got you. Tell me about the person you thought of while reading it. That’s why I wrote it. That’s what makes any of this worth it.

This isn’t the silver anniversary I could have ever imagined, but today, twenty-five years after it all began, Ken’s story is no longer just mine to carry.

And that feels exactly right.

The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories That Shape Us is available at bookstores. (See major retailers here.) Ask your local bookstore and library to order a copy or two!