Through Richard Feynman’s letter, he expressed his love for his wife who had passed away a year before. Though his letters were filled with love and care, he treated his wives with anything but. He was a work focused man and didn’t want to stray away from that. Richard was a very intelligent man, some even looked up to him without realizing the person he actually was, but it never seemed like he took a break to focus on his wife and everything else around him.
Richard loved math and even went to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for mathematics. Richards and his wife, arline, were highschool sweethearts. She was eventually diagnosed with tuberculosis. While being taken care of at home, richard had gotten offered a job at Los Alamos to help with the manhattan project in building the atomic bomb. Even though he had his work, he still wrote to her as much as he could. He would always encourage her and update her on what was going on at los alamos. He would also tell her to stay strong and make sure she is okay.
After about a year. he had her brought to Los Alamos so she could be closer to her and be taken care of there. And even though he loved her, he didn’t exactly treat her as if he loved her. He would put his work and his bongo playing over her health. He would get angry at her and tell her to stop crying and complaining. He eventually realized how he was treating her, and he wrote her a letter saying how sorry he was and that he should’ve taken in the fact that she was sick. She ended up passing away about 10 days after that letter. When he had heard that she was feeling terrible, he used his colleague’s car and rushed to be by her side. He even wrote down her time of death. Him being there stressed him out though, not because she was dying, but because he was missing work. So after she had passed, he went straight to work without a single tear in his eye or a thought about it. He later claimed, “I wasn’t delighted, but I didn’t feel terribly upset.” he even wrote and talked about how he didn’t feel any sort of emotion until over a year later, “That I didn’t cry until a number of months later, when I was in Oak Ridge. I was walking past a department store with dresses in the window, and I thought Arline would like one of them. That was too much for me.” he had realized what he had been missing out on and now had also realized that he took what he had for granted by only focusing on his work life.
In the letter, I Love My Wife. My Wife Is Dead, he would write how much he loved her and how he feels bad for not writing in almost 2 years. He would say how he couldn’t find anyone like her, “You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.” He also went on about how “in two or three meetings they all seem ashes. You only are left to me. You are real.” which also shows how their relationship was so strong and real that none of his other relationshi[s could relate to them. At the beginning of the letter, he addressed as “D’Arline” instead of saying dear Arline. I found this so sweet considering it was almost like him saying darling.
I find it ironic how in the letters, he would say how much he loved her and they would always be really sweet, but when it came to them in person, it was almost as if he treated her as if she was useless. In one of Richard’s writings, “Surely You’re Joking”, he talked about how he had adopted the mindset of a pick-up artist by treating women like they were useless. He ended up re-marrying twice to Mary Bell and Gweneth Howarth and he had 2 children, Carl and Michelle with Qweneth. His second wife, Mary, accused him of abuse. She even claimed to have cited many occasions where he had lashed out at her for disturbing his work and his bongo playing. They couldn’t do much about this case because it was around the time he had died in 1988 from abdominal cancer.
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