"I Love My Wife. My Wife Is Dead.": Richard Feynman's Letter to Arline, 1946
Famous Lettres From History - Richard Feynman's Letter to Arline, 1946
He was one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century. She had been dead for sixteen months. He sat down and wrote to her anyway, then folded the letter shut and kept it in a box for the rest of his life.
There is a postscript at the bottom of the letter that explains everything.
P.S. Please excuse my not mailing this, but I don't know your new address.
He could not send it. She was dead. He had known that when he started writing. He wrote it anyway, and when he was done he folded it, put it in the box of letters he had saved from their years apart, and kept it there until his own death in 1988. His daughter Michelle found it going through his things and published it in 2005. The world read it and has not quite recovered since.
Before the Letter: A Marriage Nobody Thought Would Work
Richard Feynman met Arline Greenbaum in Far Rockaway, Queens, when they were teenagers. She was warm, creative, and funny, the kind of person who thought of things to do and then insisted on doing them. He called her the "idea-woman," the instigator of projects, the one who made ordinary life feel like it was being actively chosen rather than passively lived.
By the time he was at MIT and then Princeton, they were in love and planning to marry. Then, in 1941, Arline was diagnosed with tuberculosis. In 1942 it was confirmed as tubercular glands of the neck, which would develop into pulmonary tuberculosis. It was serious. It was likely to shorten her life considerably.
His family worried. His father worried. The prevailing medical opinion was that tuberculosis could be transmitted, that marriage to a sick woman was a risk to him, that he was young and brilliant and had everything ahead of him and should perhaps think carefully before committing himself to a woman who might not survive.
Feynman had already thought carefully. He had consulted his own doctor. He understood the risks. He wrote to his father explaining, with characteristic precision, what the doctors had told him and what he had concluded from it: that he loved her, that the risk to himself was manageable, and that what she needed most was the security and dignity of being his wife.
On June 29, 1942, they took the ferry to Staten Island and were married in a city clerk's office. She was too ill to stand for a long ceremony. They married sitting down, with no party, no guests, and no fuss. It was the kind of wedding that happens when two people have already settled the important question and are just completing the paperwork.
"You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive."
The Years Apart: Letters Through a Wire Fence
The following year, Feynman was recruited to Los Alamos to work on the Manhattan Project. Arline could not come with him. She stayed in a sanatorium in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a three-hour drive from the base. He visited when he could, riding buses and bumming rides and solving the logistical puzzles of wartime travel with the same delight he brought to everything else. When he could not visit, they wrote.
Their letters from this period are extraordinary in their ordinariness. He told her about cracking the safes in the offices at Los Alamos. She sent him puzzles and gave him things to think about. They argued, playfully, about how to address letters. She sent him packages. He investigated treatments and wrote to hospitals about experimental therapies. The correspondence is full of daily life and jokes and the particular tenderness of two people who are used to being separated and have made the separation into a kind of art form.
He had also worked out an elaborate system for writing to her about classified things without the censors blocking the letters. Arline would send him secret codes. He would include them in his letters. The censors were not amused. The couple found this delightful.
On June 16, 1945, three weeks before the Trinity test and seven weeks before Hiroshima, Arline died. She was 25 years old. Feynman drove to Albuquerque to be with her at the end. A nurse recorded that when she died she was breathing quietly. Feynman noticed that the clock in the room had stopped at the moment of her death, and then realized it was a faulty clock that stopped often. He noted this observation down, this precise, dry correction of his own impulse toward the poetic, and went back to Los Alamos.
In his memoir he wrote that he did not cry until, weeks later, he was walking through a town and saw a dress in a shop window that Arline would have liked. Then he sat down and wept.
Sixteen months after her death, he wrote to her. He was at Cornell by then. The bomb had been dropped. The war was over. The Nobel Prize was nineteen years away. He sat down, dated the page October 17, 1946, and began.
The Letter Itself: (transcription)
“
D'Arline,
I adore you, sweetheart,
I know how much you like to hear that but i dont only write it because you like it , i write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write to you.
It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to 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. 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.
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 loving anyone else, but I want you to stand there. You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.
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.
“
What He Does Not Say
Read it again and notice what Feynman, who was constitutionally incapable of imprecision, leaves out.
He does not say he has moved on. He does not say he is healing. He does not say he is beginning to understand the loss or finding peace with it. He says the opposite. Sixteen months after her death, she still stands between him and the possibility of loving anyone else, and he wants her to stay there. He is not describing grief as something he is working through. He is describing it as something he is actively choosing, almost with satisfaction.
You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.
That sentence arrives like a punch. It is the most honest thing in the letter. It is the kind of thought most people have in grief and almost no one writes down, because writing it down makes it permanent, makes it a position rather than a feeling. Feynman wrote it down. Then he wrote two more sentences that read like a man arriving at something he had not quite said to himself before.
My darling wife, I do adore you. I love my wife. My wife is dead.
Three sentences that walk from tenderness into statement into fact. The last two are not consecutive thoughts but the same thought said twice, as if he needed to hold both things in one place at the same time: the love is present tense; the death is also present tense. He loves her now. She is dead now. Both of those things are simultaneously true and he is not resolving the contradiction, just stating it, and then signing his name.
"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."
The Postscript
The postscript is where the letter breaks open completely.
Throughout the letter, Feynman writes to Arline as if she might read it, as if the question is not whether she exists but where she is. He wants to discuss problems with her. He wants to do projects. He wants her to care for him. All of this operates in a register just to the side of full acknowledgment. He knows she is dead. He has said so. But the letter is addressed to her, which requires a kind of imaginative suspension of the finality of death, a letter-writer's fiction that the other person is somewhere and will receive this.
The postscript drops the fiction for one sentence and then, in that sentence, rebuilds it into something stranger and more devastating. He is not mailing it. But the reason he is not mailing it is not that she is dead. The reason he is not mailing it is that he does not have her new address.
She is somewhere. He just does not know where. That is all that stands between them.
It is the most delicate piece of thinking in the letter, and it is tucked into the postscript, which is where you put things that don't quite fit anywhere else.
The Box
Feynman kept the letter. He kept it in the box with all her other letters, the ones they had sent each other during the Los Alamos years, the ones full of codes and puzzles and scoldings about whether he was eating properly. He did not publish it or show it around or make it into a public act of mourning. He folded it, put it away, and carried it with him.
He married twice more. His second marriage, in 1952, ended in divorce three years later when his wife told a judge that he insisted on doing calculus problems in his head while she was trying to talk to him, which he did not deny. His third marriage, to Gweneth Howarth in 1960, lasted until his death. They had a son and adopted a daughter, Michelle, who would one day find this letter and give it to the world.
He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for his work on quantum electrodynamics, the same work he had been doing at Cornell in 1946 when he wrote to Arline. He was by then one of the most famous scientists alive, known for his teaching and his charisma and his work on the Space Shuttle Challenger investigation and his bongo drums and his extraordinary ability to explain difficult things simply.
He died in 1988. He was 69. The boxcame with him all the way to the end.
Lettre's Reflection
There is a question this letter poses that has no good answer: who do you write to when the person you want to write to is gone?
Feynman's answer, on October 17, 1946, was: you write to them anyway. You date the page. You address it properly. You say what you have been meaning to say since the last time you wrote, which was when she was still alive and could read it. You tell her that you still want to comfort her and that you want her to care for you, because those wants did not stop when she did. You list the things you had planned to learn together and note that you cannot do them now because she was the one who thought of things to do, and you are alone.
And then you fold the letter and keep it, because there is nowhere to send it and no reason to throw it away.
Letters survive their writers. They survive their recipients. They survive the circumstances that produced them and the grief that shaped them and the silence that followed. The ones that were never meant to be read are sometimes the ones that say the most, because no one edited them for an audience, no one softened the language, no one made them easier to receive.
Feynman wrote to a dead woman that she stood in the way of his loving anyone else and that he wanted her to stay there. He wrote that she was better dead than anyone else alive. He wrote that he did not know her new address.
Then he put the letter in a box and went back to inventing quantum electrodynamics.
That is, in its way, a complete portrait of a human being: the grief and the precision and the love and the absolute refusal to tidy any of it up into something easier to hold.
Some letters are not written to be sent. They are written to be true.
