I love my wife. My wife is dead (1946)

My wife died 10 years ago, so I understand that pain. Dealing with death is never easy. The thing I miss most about my wife is the depth of emotional connection; she knew everything about me being very deeply in love with me and everything I did really mattered to her. It has taken me nearly 10 years to build a network of friends who can give me comparable levels of socialization and attention; I have about two dozen very close friends (both male and female) across the world now and it’s finally enough to replace the hole in my life I had which my wife used to fill.

I can see why Feynman became sexually promiscuous afterwards, undoubtedly to numb the pain of losing his wife; seduction allowed him to have a form of that connection, albeit without the depth and love of what he had with his wife. While that path looked appealing to me, I do not regret avoiding that temptation.

On one hand I am happy that we have things like Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, on the other I feel that peoples private and unpublished writings should be kept private. It's reasonable enough to let a limited number of researchers access private documents, but the broader public, no.

This isn't a letter meant for us, it's not meant for anyone to read and I feel that publishing it is a little disrespectful.

Somewhat related: http://www.rosenfels.org/Feynman

After the war, Feynman got a "D" from an army psychological evaluation because he, among other things, told the psychiatrist that he occasionally talks to his late wife.

"Thinks people talk about him. Thinks people stare at him. Auditory hypnogogic hallucinations. Talks to self. Talks to deceased wife."

Reposts are fine after a year or so but this topic had a major thread within the last year, so the current post counts as a dupe by HN's standard. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

Love after life: Richard Feynman's letter to his departed wife (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37914958 - Oct 2023 (127 comments)

Earlier threads, in case of interest:

No Other Love: Letters from Richard Feynman to His Late Wife, Arline - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29681462 - Dec 2021 (44 comments)

Love After Life: Richard Feynman’s Letter to His Departed Wife (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24204678 - Aug 2020 (1 comment)

Richard Feynman's Extraordinary Letter to His Departed Wife - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19280764 - March 2019 (12 comments)

Feynman's Letter to His Wife - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10375283 - Oct 2015 (60 comments)

Richard Feynman’s Love Letter to His Wife Sixteen Months After Her Death - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7893757 - June 2014 (1 comment)

Feynman: I love my wife. My wife is dead. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4178368 - June 2012 (2 comments)

As someone in my first real realtionship of 5+ years[0] with someone I love more than I could ever have imagined, this hits pretty hard...

I know it's a bit cliche and cringe to say, but my partner really did become my best friend. If I feel bad, the first thing I search for is being close and talking to them. We understand and support each other completely and do random things together, like described in the letter.

We'll move in together in about a year, loosing them would probably rock me really hard and I currently can't imagine who I'd use as emotional support, as the person in question would be gone.

May we happily be together for a long time <3

[0] only realized now that i've been with them for almost all of my adult life (yes, not that old).

I did not know Feynman was responsible for finding the cause of the Challenger explosion. That's remarkable on top of everything else he did.

People appreciating this letter might also appreciate "A crow look at me" by Mount Eerie (a one-person music project), written by Phil just after his wife died of cancer, and dealing with it.

Here's an example track: https://genius.com/Mount-eerie-real-death-lyrics

A little longer (76 pages), but A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis is also worth checking out:

* http://www.samizdat.qc.ca/arts/lit/PDFs/GriefObserved_CSL.pd... (Canada public domain)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Grief_Observed

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26077627-a-grief-observe...

Ten days from now will mark the one year anniversary of my wife's death. We would have been together for 11 years last November. It's tough. I really understand this letter, I think. You can't stop loving them. Why would you want to? It hurts. I send her Facebook messages, although earlier today it said it couldn't send them. I could write a letter, but that is not how we communicated. I may have to think of some other form of "communication" soon. An email, perhaps.

Did anyone else guess it was Feynman before clicking?

Coping with the death of a loved one is an unbearable task for me. They say that time heals. In my case, time does not heal; it allows me to forget more often that the person is no longer there. And to forget the constant feeling of missing them

It's beautiful :))

One book that was helpful for me after my dad died was Garson Kieler's book "Good Poems for Hard Times" [1]. It's a beautiful anthology of poems that helps with working through life, loss, and grief. Each time I open it, a different poem speaks to me and has helped me grapple not only with my loss, but with my own life.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39690.Good_Poems_for_Har...

This reminds me of John Scalzi's early SF book, Old Man's War. One of the MC's motivations throughout the book was the love of his wife. Apart from the pew-pew aspects, it's one of those stories that can hit you in the feels in the appropriate places. Won't say any more since it'd give away too much.

Man, when the analytical minded come to grips with emotions it always hits hard for me. I love that he reflects on the impractically of his own thoughts and just accepts how he feels. This love letter hits hard

This is beautiful. And not just beautiful, but true, I think.

I've been working through thoughts about my dead mother the past few months, in concert with a new partner in my life who also lost her mother. We've been working through some thoughts... somewhat related to an information-theoretic view of death. Here's an excerpt of something I wrote on the topic[1] in 2018:

[snip] So anyhow, as I’m sitting in on this session [about IETF multistakeholder internet governance], and I’m realizing that what we’re really trying to figure out with internet governance is how to govern a complex system. So it’s perhaps less internet governance, but rather network governance. And so what patterns have we seen in other systems, that deals with this challenge of creating space for new participants, while honouring the history of past participants?

And this lead to some interesting thoughts on the big pattern that often goes unspoken: Death.

### DEATH IS HEGEMONIC.

It may sound funny to describe death as a pattern. We often talk about it like it’s this fact of existence. And it might as well be. It’s omnipresent. Pretty much every living thing we know of, dies. It has prevailed in all living networks, through countless iterations. Death is hegemonic.

But what about death might be selected for? How does it benefit the network? Perhaps it’s best to imagine this first at the scale of individual personal relationships. That’s simpler, and I believe the reasoning is portable up to larger social scales.

Imagine how we might have moved on from Newtonian physics if that intellectual heavy-weight Newton were still alive and influential within the network. One could imagine that it might be difficult. Newton’s thinking was clever, but we also understand it to be misguided by today’s measure. In a world without death, new ideas would have to grapple and contend not just with static ideas and information, but with the dynamic and increasingly stubborn minds that birthed them. (This [stubbornness and confidence](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c3ef/2811b280c069c6a99d66e4...) of age, is perhaps another selected pattern, with it’s own subtle network rationale, but I digress.)

Instead, the mind of an organism dies, and leaves information scattered throughout the human network in the form of static reference — in the minds of family and peers, in blog posts and newspaper articles, in books and distorted recollections.

So how would one describe the pattern of death? Through an unsentimental network lens, we could perhaps think about it as a data compression or noise reduction tactic of the larger evolving system. Or at a more human scale, we could imagine it as a process by which organisms go from the role of __living dynamic actors__ to become __static references__.

While the Newton example is on a worldly stage, there’s perhaps another example that’s more on the personal level. You can imagine this same dynamic playing in the relations between parents and children. The death of a parent, tragic as it is, is an opportunity for this complex character to move from __actor__ to __reference__ in the minds of their children. This memory is now open to healthy reinterpretation, which perhaps gives their ideas and actions more meaning than when they were alive. A static reference of a human, whether it’s a memory or a book or an article, becomes a bare skeleton picked clean, on which to hang new ideas and emotions and reflections.

After death, what remains is an abstraction — a simplification of the human who once was. But this abstraction can be re-imagined and built upon by the folks who follow.

And maybe this is healthy. Maybe this makes for healthy societies, with the right balance of new imaginings and old wisdoms on which to hang them.

I have a hard time with death. I don't think of my mother as much as I'd like. But in the past few weeks, I've started writing to her in an empty group chat that goes to no one. I've been going through old emails and replying to all the messages I never responded to, which have previously been the source of a lot of shame.

And it's really helping me. It's like she's continuing to grow with me, and me with her. And not just that, but it's helping me override the version of her (the broken versions, the sick versions) that overrepresent my recollections of her in the months before her death.

In writing and communing with her, even in her absence, my relationship with her in growing, and she is growing too. And she's more alive in my conversations with my living family. And I'm reflecting my daily interactions and decisions through her consideration. It's very strange. I feel like I've been reintroduced to my mother.

And it's also leading me to odd thoughts. Is every departure or absence of the true and active physical form (not just in death) a chance to consider someone like this. Can I share secret thoughts with a new love, with an imagined version of them, since the flesh-and-blood version of them would be scared of my sharing such things with them? Can I treat the living as dead in some ways, to shape them in my mind just as much as I might shape them later in the real world? Is this what we're always doing implicitly, when we build models of one another an empathize and imagine what they might do, in the spaces between when we have access to them? And what might we be losing in the world when we never have these absences, when we are never disconnected, never far enough away to grow alongside the imagined version of our loved ones, rather than trying to grow only with the actual biological one?

Anyhow, thanks for hearing me out on these thoughts. I will imagine a reader as entertained and grateful, until you choose to reveal yourself otherwise <3

[1]: https://medium.com/@patcon/reflections-on-the-evolved-patter...

Not a knock on Feynman, but he did re-marry in '52, which ended in divorce a few years later and then married a third time in '60, and stayed married until his death.

I sometimes think about what my life would be like if my wife passed away. I'm also a father, and sometimes I wonder what life would be like if I lost my entire family. I think I'd have a hard time finding purpose and would either spiral or would become hyper focused in my career.

It is amazing. I had the same "best friend" for 20 years, from age 3 until 23, but almost as soon as I set eyes on my wife she became my best friend and became a much deeper and beloved one. I find that much of my motivation in life is because I want the best for her and our children.

"PS Please excuse my not mailing this — but I don’t know your new address."

That hit hard.

Having the feels over an HN post was not in my list today.

What a turbulence of emotions and thoughts this invokes in me; I envy this guys beautiful and rich love for his wife, since I haven't felt similar myself.

Simultaneously I also really feel for him and the grief and miss that comes from losing someone you love; I still somewhat often talk to my mother who passed to remind her that I still think of her and out of love.

These emotions are ambiguously painful and meaningful.

That's hard.

Half way through reading that, I stopped and sent my partner a message telling them how much I love and respect them. They have recently passed the 5 year survival mark after a cancer diagnosis and treatment, and are coming up on 3 years for their second different cancer diagnosis and treatment.

None of us knows how much time we have ourselves or with our loved ones, so make the most of it in the moment.

You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.

Beautiful. Leave this mark on someone.

Richard Feynman: Physicist and bon vivant.

I think that's why he's so interesting to people. He defies the stereotypes we have for a nerdy intellectual that suggests smart people don't know how to have fun or socialize or love...etc.

I have been down this road, but the lessons I learn are not the obvious ones. My wife died in chikdbirth, so it was a double whammy. She was in some respects my soulmate, but she was also one of the most difficult people I have ever know. Had she not doed, I absolutely know that there is zero chance that we would still be together as a family.

We need to tell those we have lost that we have loved them. We also need to thank them and apologize to them. Here is Asia it is easier to talk with the dead, for which I am grateful.

However, I eventually learned to accept that we also need to know how to tell them to fuck off and leave us alone. If we fail to learn this, then we pass on their ghosts to those who we go on to love.

I hosted Shaun Usher, the author of Letters of Note, at Google:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xg7LRg2NAfM&list=PL4ugKP-T4L...

I had Googlers pick a letter out of the book and read it aloud. I don't think we did that one, though. There are a lot of moving and occasionally funny letters in that book and it'd make a great gift for someone.

Interestingly enough, Shaun courted his wife entirely by pen-and-paper letters, and this was well after the Internet era.