Writing Grief

November 6, 2025

by Robin Lippincott, fiction and creative nonfiction faculty

I am in Provincetown, Massachusetts once again, this glorious, narrow strip of land at the end of Cape Cod. Though P’town is a place I’ve loved deeply and visited countless times for over forty years, it has been almost eight years since I was last here, the longest stretch I have ever gone since my first visit in the early 1980s. I am here now to scatter the remains of my beloved friend and first creative writing teacher, Bruce Aufhammer, as I promised him I would do. I will also have the opportunity to view the commemorative paver I bought for my late partner, Lee; Provincetown was a special place for him—and for us—as well.

Bruce and I were friends for around fifty years, and though I miss him and always will, I can’t feel too sad about his death: he was eighty-seven, lived a full and happy life, and his death was peaceful; reportedly, he died talking, actually in the middle of a sentence.

Provincetown at night, off-season, is well-suited to musing about grief and loss. Walking away from town in the East End where there are few streetlights, it’s pitch dark, and this visual deprivation can enhance the sound of waves washing ashore in the bay, along with the occasional, mournful moan of a foghorn.

Like many people, especially those of us of a certain age, I have experienced my share of loss and grief, in my case specifically and horribly in the last bunch of years: I lost my longtime partner, Lee, to ALS; my best friend Martha died from metastatic breast cancer; three other good friends have also died. And then more recently there was yet another loss, which I will say more about in a moment.

In 2019, roughly a year and a half after Lee died, I started writing a memoir about what we had gone through during his illness and death. I hadn’t been able to write for several years and that was the only thing I wanted to write at the time. It was too soon, however, and eventually I put the memoir aside.

But over the last six months, the most striking thing has happened in my writing life: I wrote something in response to loss and grief that, unexpectedly, turned out to be helpful to me, and I’ve hoped it might be helpful to others as well; in fact, I’ve already heard that it was helpful to some of the few who have read it.

This past spring, my first great love, who I’ll call G, died. Though we hadn’t seen each other for some forty years, nor even been in touch for most of that time, his death was especially poignant because within the past few years we had reconnected by email, acknowledged how important we had been to each other, and because we were now living within a two-hour drive of one another, there was the hope that we would see each other again. But then he died (esophageal cancer) before that could happen.

Within about week of hearing about G’s death, completely unbidden and surprising even to me, I started writing about him, about our relationship, and about his death—because I needed to; the unresolved nature of things between us haunted me.

Spending that time writing about G and our relationship, specifically doing so in the form of a letter to him, was initially helpful to me simply in terms of how I was spending my time as I grieved. After several weeks of writing and revision I reached an ending, and unexpectedly, I experienced catharsis, even though that was not why I was writing, or at least not consciously. I also experienced, in the end, the aesthetic pleasure derived from having created something beautiful and true, which has been my barometer since I first started writing. That piece is called “White Space,” and it appears in The Los Angeles Review. It begins with an epigraph, this sentence from the novel Pitch Dark, by Renata Adler; a sentence that has lived in my head since first reading Adler’s novel shortly after it was published in 1983, because what’s said and the way that it’s said, specifically the syntax, sends me:

“You are, you know, you were the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life.”

From there, the piece itself, in epistolary form, took off.

Recently, I told a friend mourning the loss of her mother and her best friend, a renowned poet, who died within a short period of time of one another, about my experience writing “White Space” and how it had helped me; I suggested that she might want to try to put something of what she is experiencing into words too, that it might be useful. I’ve written this blog post to suggest the same for those of you to whom it might apply. And now I’m thinking that I might finally be ready to return to work on the memoir, too.

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Robin Lippincott is the author of Blue Territory: A Meditation on the Life and Art of Joan Mitchell and five other books. His most recent fiction publication was in Still: A Journal, No. 46, Fall, 2024; his most recent essay was published Nov. 6, 2025, in The Los Angeles Review.