Feynman, Richard P.

Published in: Michelle Feynman, ed. Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track. The Letters of Richard P. Feynman. pp. 68-69.

"YOU, DEAD, ARE SO MUCH BETTER THAN ANYONE ELSE ALIVE... I LOVE MY WIFE. MY WIFE IS DEAD." 

So penned Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman to his childhood sweetheart and first wife Arline, 16 months after her death from tuberculosis on June 16, 1945 at the young age of 25, and 15 months after the first test detonation of the atom bomb on July 16, 1945, in what is surely the most poignant and powerful love letter of the 20th century.

This heartbreaking letter is the conclusion of an incredible archive of letters written by Feynman to Arline while he was at the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico developing the atom bomb as part of the the top secret Manhattan Project, and while Arline was dying of tuberculosis in a sanatorium in Albuquerque.  (The 40 letter correspondence is also offered in this sale.) As noted in Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman (p. 68), the letter is well worn, much more than all the other letters written to Arline during this period, and it appears as if he reread it often.

It reads in full: 

"Thursday, Oct. 17, '46

D'Arline,

I adore you sweetheart. 

I know how much you like to hear that—but I don't only write it because you like it—I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write it to you.

It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you—almost two years but I know you'll excuse me because you understand how I am, stubborn and realistic; and I thought there was no sense in writing.

But now I know my darling wife that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing, and what I have done so much in the past. I want to tell you I love you. I want to love you—I always will love you.

I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead—but I still want to comfort and take care of you—and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you—I want to do little projects with you. I never thought until just now that we can do that together. What should we do. We started to learn to make clothes together—or learn Chinese—or getting a movie projector. Can't I do something now. No. I am alone without you and you were the "idea woman" and general instigator of all our wild adventures. 

When you were sick you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to and thought I needed. You needn't have worried. Just as I told you then there was no real need because I loved you in so many ways so much. And now it is clearly even more true—you can give me nothing now yet I love you so that you stand in my way of laving anyone else—but I want to stand there. You, dead, are so much better that anyone else alive.

I know you will assure me that I am foolish and that you want me to have full happiness and don't want to be in my way. I'll bet that you are surprised that I don't even have a girlfriend (except you, sweetheart) after two years. But you can't help it darling, nor can I—I don't understand it, for I have met many girls and very nice ones and I don't want to remain alone—but in two or three meetings they all seem ashes. You only are left to me. You are real. 

My darling wife, I do adore you. I love my wife. My wife is dead. 

Rich

P.S. Please excuse my not mailing this—but I don't know your new address."

Arline's death occurred at a time of incredible pressure for Feynman; the work he and the rest of the team at Los Alamos was of profound importance, and in order to be up to the task, Feynman was forced to compartmentalize Arline's illness; he returned to working on the project immediately, and didn't cry about her death until many months had passed, as he later recounted: "Maybe I was fooling myself, but I was surprised how I didn't feel what I though people would expect to feel under the circumstances. I wasn't delighted, but I didn't feel terribly upset, perhaps because I had known for seven years that something like this was going to happen. I didn't know how I was going to face all of my friends up at Los Alamos. I didn't want people with long faces talking to me about it. When I got back... they asked me what happened. 'She's dead. And how's the program going?' They caught on right away that I didn't want to moon over it. (I had obviously done something to myself psychologically: Reality was so important - I had to understand what really happened to Arline, physiologically - that I didn't cry until a number of months later, when I was in Oak Ridge. I was walking past a department store with dresses in the window, and I thought Arline would like one of them. That was too much for me.)" ("Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman." Adventures of a Curious Character, 2018. pp. 151-152)