Some Friends Know All Versions Of You
- Ron Stempkowski
- 3 hours ago
- 2 min read
The mantle above my fireplace holds two framed photographs and a greeting card propped between them.
On the left: a group of friends—the A-List we call ourselves because we started in Level A at Second City and went through the entire 2-year program from beginning to end together—laughing, arms around each other, the kind of photo where everyone looks exactly like themselves. These are people who knew me when I met Ken—who loved him, mourned him, and then quietly, steadily kept showing up for me. On the right: a smaller frame, a different chapter from when I Ken and I got married in Iowa in 2009. And in the middle, sent by my friend Retta (in purple) when this season of my life began to open up in new ways, a card that reads simply: *This is your moment.*
Some friendships are time capsules. Others are throughlines.
The people in that photo on the left belong to the second kind. They carry Ken with them—in stories they still tell, in the way they say his name without flinching, in the quiet acknowledgment that he was real and he mattered and his absence still takes up space. When I'm with them, the past doesn't feel like a place I had to leave. It feels like a room I can still walk into and visit for a while.
That matters more than I knew it would.
I spent years learning how to live forward—which is the only direction grief eventually points you. But "forward" doesn't mean "away." The friends who helped me understand that weren't the ones who told me to move on. They were the ones who moved *with* me, carrying the same history, honoring the same love, while still making room for whoever I was becoming.
That's the thing about long friendships: they hold all versions of you at once. The one who was broken open, and the one who rebuilt. The one who laughed in that photo years ago, and the one who got the card.
Retta sent that card because she saw the moment I was stepping into. She'd also seen every moment that made this one possible. That's not a small thing. That's everything.
I've been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be “stitched together”—how we're not really single, continuous selves so much as a patchwork of everyone who's stayed. The grief I've written about. The reinvention I've lived. The joy I'm finally, fully leaning into. None of it exists in isolation. It exists because of the people who've held the thread across all of it.
So, if you have someone like that in your life—someone who knew you before, knows you now, and shows up anyway—tell them how much they mean to you.
Because some people don't just witness your story, they help you survive it long enough to see what it was becoming.
*These are the kinds of stories I've spent years learning how to tell. If this one resonated, my memoir* The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories That Shape Us *is available now—a collection of essays about grief, reinvention, and the surprising grace that shows up in between. Visit my Linktree: https://linktr.ee/ronstempkowski
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