The Luck We Carry

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.