In 1946, Richard Feynman wrote to his wife 16 months after her death, confronting the one mystery ‘The Great Explainer’ could not solve: ‘What it means to love you after you are dead…’

“When I was very young, I thought my father knew everything.” There is something wonderfully childlike about believing this of a parent, that somewhere inside the person who holds your hand is an answer to every question the world might ask.

For Michelle Feynman, that belief was reasonable. Her father was Richard Feynman, one of the great physicists of the twentieth century, a man who spent his life asking questions about the universe and refusing to be satisfied with easy answers.

As Michelle grew older, she began to notice things her father did not know, she recalled in a 2005 article for Discover magazine. For a while, she thought this meant that perhaps she had finally grown wise enough to have the answers herself. Then, in her late teens, she began to discover more about her father and his wisdom, and to know how much there was still to wonder about.


Her father, 'The Great Explainer' was a wise man with a tremendous appetite for life, an insatiable curiosity about how the world worked and a great aptitude for teaching. He spent his life asking questions about the universe, from the behavior of subatomic particles to the nature of light and matter. He became a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, a gifted teacher and one of the most recognizable scientific figures of his generation.

Yet there was one mystery that belonged to a different world entirely. He was a lover, a ferocious one indeed. Sixteen months after his wife and high-school sweetheart, Arline, died of tuberculosis at 25, Feynman sat down and wrote her a letter, without an address but with a unsolved mystery. There could be no reply. He wrote anyway, with a devastating acknowledgment of reality.

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Richard Feynman was a physicist with serious questions

Born in New York City in 1918, Feynman became one of the most influential physicists of his generation. He worked on the Manhattan Project during the Second World War and later made fundamental contributions to quantum electrodynamics. In 1965, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga for their work on quantum electrodynamics. Decades later, he became widely known beyond physics for his role on the Rogers Commission investigating the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

But long before the Nobel Prize, before the public fame there was a young man deeply in love with his high-school sweetheart. Her name was Arline.

Arline died at 25, Feynman was 27 then

Richard Feynman and Arline Greenbaum had known each other since their youth and married in 1942, even as she was battling tuberculosis. The disease eventually took her life.

Arline died in June 1945 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She was only 25. Feynman was 27. His grief did not arrive all at once. In his later recollections, he described how he did not immediately cry after her death. Months later, while walking past a department-store window in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, he saw a dress that he thought Arline would have liked.

That was when he finally broke down. It was an ordinary object that suddenly made her absence tangible. Then, in October 1946, roughly sixteen months after her death, Feynman wrote to her.

‘You can give me nothing now yet I love you…”’

The letter is remarkably ordinary in places. Feynman does not write only about death or eternity. He writes about the things they had once planned to do together. He remembers learning to make clothes, learning Chinese and getting a movie projector.

He misses having someone with whom to discuss problems and make plans.

He misses the person he describes as the “idea-woman” and the instigator of their adventures.

And then his letter turns toward the contradiction he cannot resolve, “I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead…”

He admits that he has met other women and does not want to remain alone. But after a few meetings, they seem like “ashes” compared with Arline.

Then comes the line that has survived as perhaps the most powerful expression of his grief: “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.”

And he follows it with an even more startling confession, “You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.”

The letter was never meant to be answered

There is something particularly moving about the fact that Feynman did not write the letter because he expected a response. He was writing into an impossible correspondence.

The letter remained sealed after he wrote it in 1946. Feynman died in 1988, more than forty years later. While researching his biography Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, writer James Gleick discovered the letter among Feynman's papers.

Gleick later recalled the discovery with extraordinary emotion, saying that his “heart stopped,” to the Marginalian's Maria Popova in 2017. The letter had survived its intended recipient.

Arline could never read it. But the words eventually reached millions of people who had never met either of them.

The man who explained the universe could not explain this

Feynman spent his life trying to understand things. He questioned assumptions, challenged easy answers and taught generations of people to remain curious about the unknown.

His daughter remembered him as a man with an insatiable curiosity about how the world worked.

But in this letter, written when he was still a young widower, Feynman encounters something he cannot reduce to an explanation.

He cannot understand, “in my mind,” what it means to love someone after they are dead. So he does not try to solve it.

He writes it down. That may be why the letter has endured for so long. It is not really a letter about death. It is a letter about what death cannot necessarily take away.

The plans, conversations and the person are all gone; it's only love that remains.

And at the end, Feynman signs: “I love my wife. My wife is dead. Rich.”

Then, unable to resist one last attempt at humor, he adds the only postscript a man, even with brilliance like his, would write to the dead could possibly write. He doesn't know her new address.

Richard Feynman’s love letter to his deceased wife

This letter was also published by multiple websites, including Letters of Note.