Love Letters: "I love my wife. My wife is dead."

Manhattan Project physicist Richard Feynman writes a love letter to his late wife, Arline, sixteen months after her death at age 25.

In the storm of World War II, the United States raced against time to complete the world’s first atomic bomb. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of Los Alamos, was on a mission to recruit the country’s top physicists to join his secret government lab in the New Mexico desert. One such physicist was Princeton’s Richard Feynman, who was only twenty-four years old. In his life, he would become one of the most influential, well-decorated scientists of the twentieth century.

But Feynman hesitated to accept Oppenheimer’s offer. His young wife Arline was fatally ill with tuberculosis and he could not move to Los Alamos without her. He decided to turn down the opportunity until one winter day in early 1943, Feynman received a call from Oppenheimer. The Los Alamos director had located a tuberculosis sanatorium for Arline in Albuquerque so that Feynman could work in Los Alamos and visit his wife on the weekends. Touched, Feynman joined the Manhattan Project.

While Feynman worked at Los Alamos, he and his wife visited and exchanged letters frequently. To the chagrin of Los Alamos security, sometimes for fun Arline sent him letters in code so he could practice his code-breaking.

Shortly before the project’s success in summer 1945, Arline died. Feynman would marry twice more but never quite recovered from her death. The couple complimented one another wonderfully. Their dedication and playfulness even through the hardest moments is the kind of love we all seek.

Below is the letter Richard Feynman wrote to his wife Arline sixteen months after her untimely death. It would remain sealed in an envelope until after his death in 1988.

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October 17, 1946

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 to writing.

But now I know my darling wife that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing, and that 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. 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 loving anyone else — but I want you to stand there. You, dead, are so much better than 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 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.

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

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