Join us at Macy's on State Street for a signing of "The Luck We Carry" by Ron Stempowski

The Luck We Carry is a memoir in essays — part love story, part grief map, part unexpected comedy. It follows Ron Stempkowski through the decade he spent building a life with his husband Ken, the two years he spent watching cancer take him, and the years after when he had to figure out who he was without the person who had shaped him most. Structured in five parts — The Climb, The Descent, The Ground Beneath Me, The Origin Story, and The Return of Joy — the book uses the metaphor of a mountain to help readers locate themselves inside their own grief journey. Author's Notes accompany each essay, where Ron's present-day self reflects on what his earlier self was still learning. The result is a book that is deeply honest but never maudlin, filled with laughter, wonder, absurdity, and the ongoing surprise that life can still be beautiful. Ron writes with a journalist's eye for detail and a memoirist's willingness to be seen. Near the end of Ken's life, his hospice grief counselor—author Claire Bidwell Smith, who also wrote the book's foreword—asked Ken if there was anything he wanted her to pass along to Ron after he was gone. She typed his words into her phone, so she'd have them exactly. Months after Ken died, over drinks on a summer night in Chicago, she handed Ron his husband's final message: I still am. Together we still be. We're still here. We still exist together. Those four lines became Ron's compass — and the emotional core of this book.