Feyman’s Letter to His Dead Wife

You’re listening to A Way With Word, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

We’ve been talking during this show about the new book, Letters of Note.

And there’s a letter that I want to share that was written by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman.

In June of 1945, his wife Arlene, his high school sweetheart, died of tuberculosis at the age of 25.

And 16 months later, he wrote his late wife a love letter and sealed it in an envelope that remained unopened until after his death in 1988.

And I can’t read all of it, but I’m going to read parts of it that I think are so moving.

He starts out, 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.

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.

And later he says, 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.

And then toward the end, he says,

My darling wife, I do adore you.

I love my wife. My wife is dead. And he signs it rich and then adds, P.S., please excuse my not mailing this, but I don’t know your new address.

And the whole letter just takes my breath away. And part of the reason is because I think what he’s articulating here is something that you experience when you lose somebody like that.

You don’t really lose them, but your relationship changes.

Right, exactly. Yeah. It brings back a lot of memories for me as well, for the people that I’ve lost.

And it’s interesting to think such a brilliant man was he’s got this part in the letter where he talks about not being able to articulate exactly what he’s thinking.

I mean, he’s done a great job in this letter and it’s beautiful and I don’t think I could do it.

But there’s a moment in there where he admits, I just don’t really know how to put this down.

That last line you read, though, I took that as a joke when I read the letter.

I really think that that might have been the kind of the relationship they had where they could talk seriously to each other about their feelings and about their intentions and plans and all the stuff they’re going to do and had done together.

And then also a little bit of joke, like, I don’t know your current address.

You know, I thought I saw an echo there of the relationship that he had with this woman.

Isn’t it beautiful?

Yeah.

Well, there’s lots of letters in this book like this.

This is letters of note compiled by Sean Usher.

Some of them are serious like that.

They’ll move you, and some of them are hilarious.

Many of them are significant in history.

There are letters written on cuneiform tablets.

There are letters written in many other foreign languages on bark from Russia in a strange dialect from the 1300s.

There’s a letter from a pregnant wife to her dead husband from Korea from the 1500s.

Really astonishing stuff, and some of it you’ve never seen before.

Most of this stuff has not been around the block.

If you’ve got a favorite letter, maybe something somebody wrote to you or something that you found on the Letters of Note website,

We’d love to have you share it with us, 877-929-9673,

Or email us, words@waywordradio.org.