I love my wife. My wife is dead (1946) | Hacker News Reader

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

lettersofnote.com

450 pointstu7001128 comments

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.

> 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.

He married again in 1952 and divorced in 1958 (and married again a couple of years later).

I don't know if sexual promiscuity was part of the divorce complaint but apparently this fragment was in it: "He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens. He did calculus while driving in his car, while sitting in the living room, and while lying in bed at night."

After reading lots of biographical material on Feynman it seems like he was a very loving father and husband (especially to his first wife) but obviously devoted to physics. I would imagine it's very difficult to find the balance between his kind of career and family such that the family feels they get sufficient attention.

It’s difficult when you want to live three lives in one human lifetime, and academia is one of those careers where that might happen to you.

> academia is one of those careers where that might happen to you

why? i dont follow. is academia so special there?

I imagine it's because of the lure of pure-research and self-actualization and pursuing an area of study with almost no limitations. No idea if this is true or not, but this is how I idealize academia.

Opposed to "industry" -- where you're under constant pressure to figure out why some random docker container pull fails or mutating web hook won't let your pod be deleted. It's just not fun or meaningful. It's a slog and the needless complexity is doing nothing but increasing.

Yes, I think academics are susceptible to defining themselves by their work, truly being to devoted to their subject and it's open ended so you can spend as much time as you choose on it.

I think these things can all be true in industry though. I say this as an industry researcher myself that has struggled with work/life balance my whole career. In the more soul destroying industry jobs hopefully you can at least clock out at 5pm and pay attention to other interests, i.e. you don't have to care about work outside of work hours.

I actually think it's more to do with the person than the job though. It's about how much you value work/career achievements and recognition vs family vs hobbies. Caveat: some people genuinely have to work unreasonable amounts of hours to put food on the table for their family and that's unfortunate.

More inclined to always be working because there’s more of a love of what you do… they certainly aren’t doing it for the money lol.

    > "He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens. He did calculus while driving in his car, while sitting in the living room, and while lying in bed at night."

God, I love this quote. It describes me to a T in my 20s (except replace "calculus" with "programming"). Everyone that I dated complained similarly. I used to drag that Bjarne Stroustrup tome "The C++ Programming Language" everywhere I went. I couldn't get enough of that C++ bible at the time. His writing style really helped to open my mind to become a better programmer.

Iirc at the time there was still "at fault divorce", and the divorce settlement was influenced by who was at fault. So a (likely overly charitable reading) of the entire thing is that Feynman agreed to be portrayed in a bad light to achieve a fairer Deal for his soon to be ex wife.

Maybe it was required to get a divorce at all but otherwise it seems that he could have settled on something “fair” without needing to force himself into it.

> It has taken me nearly 10 years to build a network of friends who can give me comparable levels of socialization and attention;

building close friends as an adult is a known Hard Problem when everyone has their own lives. any big insights or breakthroughs you can share for the rest of us?

Prioritize for empathy as a quality you look for in people. I find that empathic people tend to be very, very good friends.

And lots of flexibility and forgiveness (for small things).

I second this. My best friends are still the childhood friends. Every time I'm getting closer with someone new it fails sooner or later because of other duties we already have in life.

Make time for people. Be open. Choose love and kindness. Accept that relationships are a journey and take effort - on both sides.

It won't always work. I've done pretty well at this tbh, but it has helped living in a city like London where soicalising is one of the main activites and easily facilitated - to an extent at least. Context is key, no doubt.

Marathon, not a sprint. Everyone's busy so gradually making yourself a mutual part of another person's life will take time.

Balancing personal responsibilities and finding time for meaningful connections is hard for me. That's why I have so little friends...

I am so happy that you were able to build that emotional connection. My dad is terminally ill and often I think about what I will miss most when he is no more. And I realized it would be the depth of emotional connection - a person who knows you in and out and unconditionally loves you.

I try to steel myself about the coming eventuality, but all I know is it's going to be a deep abyss and it will take everything to climb out of it.

I lost my mom to cancer when I was 17. She fought with it for 6.5 years prior. Even knowing it was coming it was devastating. 24 years later I still miss her, I'm sure I always will. It hurts knowing that I'm now older than she was when she passed.

When it happened it was the worst emotional pain I had experienced, it does get better in time. Your feelings are valid. You don't have to feel whatever anyone else thinks you should feel. It feels cliche that it gets better in time, in my experience tho it does. I'm sorry your dad and family is going thru that. Oddly I found Cyberpunk 2077 to be therapeutic on coming to terms with that situation. In the game you play a character who essentially has a terminal disease, there are a lot of moments in the game that rang very true to the emotions I experienced.

When your dad eventually departs, you are allowed to feel anything. I have been the type to laugh at a funeral remembering something funny the departed said or did. If you feel like crying that's ok too.

Thanks for the kind words.

I lost my dad 14 years ago. I hope you get to have as much of the remaining time together as possible.

What's odd is that I still don't feel the need to look at photos of him. Like, no need whatsoever. I don't have a photo of my late dad on the wall, even though we had a truly excellent father-son relationship with a lot of warmth. The true memory of him resides in my head; and what's more, I notice myself replicating his exact body language at times. Explicitly realizing this always feels funny, almost like I want to express gratitude to him for "inheriting" those movements to me :). I think the bonds still hold strong, and they forever will, but, oddly, there's no need whatsoever to visualize it with a photo. It's simply much deeper than that.

On another side, I often miss the ability to ask my dad "factual", practical questions. E.g. -- because he was a construction engineer -- how to do some specific thing in grandpa's house renovations; how to position a beam, etc. During the first months after his death, this was a common recurring thought: I'm stuck while building something, but "hey, I'll just ask dad tomorrow how to do it right; yeah, I'll just call him" -- following by "oh, I forgot I can't". After this, there was always an interesting feeling of emptiness or standstill -- not sadness, just a really deep understanding that, no matter what, life moves on. And I still get to live mine. I actually came to enjoy those moments of emptiness.

Thanks for sharing your story, it is very moving. Grief will have different stages; to me, it has mostly been really deep introspection. Take it easy, mate.

Thanks for sharing - you were fortunate to have a father who loved you as much as he did.

Everything will be fine. Wishing you great strength!

I always felt a sense of betrayal when someone sought a new partner after their spouse dies. But when I read a passage by Freeman Dyson about Feynman's trip to Santa Fe to meet his new girlfriend, my view has significantly shifted. Dyson (or perhaps someone else; I don't recall exactly) spoke of Feynman as someone who cannot stay out of a romantic relationship for too long. Some men just always want to love and be loved.

If you die before your partner, do you want them to remain single the rest of their lives?

If that were to happen to me, I definitely want my wife to love and be loved again.

There is an absolutely heartbreaking(to me at least) moment in the classics in "Sayings of the Spartan Women" when Leonidas is leading his men to Thermophylae to almost certain death at the hands of the Persians his wife asks him what she should do if he dies and he says "Marry a good man, and bear good children."

I think this is amazing. He wants her to lead a happy and full life. I for sure would want that for my wife if I was to die first. I love her to bits and would want her to be happy.

That's because true love is unselfish.

The idea of a couple that belongs together beyond death might sound romantic but is ultimately too tough on the one left behind, especially if the loving couple are separated with the "leftover" still being relatively young.

(On a side note, I'm positively excited to read a quote on HN that dates from about 480 before Christ. It surely is still relevant two and a half thousand years later.)

I've even heard stories where the one who is dying offers advice to the one who will survive about which of their single friends would likely make the best match.

And why not? Who knows the remaining spouse better than the departing one? Who has better insight than that? It seems like a deeply loving thing to do.

Even though her death was sudden and there was no chance to prepare for it, it makes me smile to know my sister's widower married someone who knew and loved my sister too. And it's probably easier for the second spouse this way too, because she does have context for her husband's grief. She also grieves the anniversary of my sister's death, obviously not in the same way, but with an understanding that someone who didn't know my sister would struggle to have.

I'm facing just this problem and would not: https://jakeseliger.com/2023/08/30/turning-two-lives-into-on...

My partner always tells me that if something happens to me, that's it for him. He doesn't want a relationship with anyone else.

To me, that is the saddest thought in the world. My sincerest hope is that he would find someone else he loves as much as me, and that he would tell her stories about me and let me be a happy memory rather than a sad one.

My uncle's wife remarried years after my uncle died after a long illness. She married a man who, himself, had been similarly widowed. She wore a gray wedding dress to indicate that she had been married before, and they placed two beautiful photos of their late partners behind the altar where they made their vows.

It was really beautiful and inspiring to see them carry on with their lives and love again, while proudly bringing along the memories of the two people they had lost and still loved as well. When I visit them at their home, it is filled with pictures of them with each other and with their late spouses, all intermixed, and it's deeply comforting to me. Even though they never knew each other before they were widowed, they tell me that it feels like they know each other's late spouses as if they had all been good friends together.

If I were the one dying of a long illness, knowing that something like that was on my partner's future would give me a more peaceful death. I wouldn't feel like I was letting him down and ruining his life — just saying goodbye to him in this chapter of his life, while finishing up my own chapter.

I lost my wife to cancer after a brief struggle a year ago.

Everyone is different, and you don’t know what or how you’ll feel unless it happens to you.

For example, at a point, I felt guilty for not being sad. My son and I went to the beach and had a great time. I felt an intense guilt afterwards. But I focused on fitness and other things and tried to make each day better. Time and positive work heals.

In terms of love, etc, the heart has room. Some people are ready before the body is cold, others take years to contemplate a relationship. All i can offer is that as someone who has walked a mile in these shoes, I’d never cast a negative judgement on widower/widow behavior that isn’t plainly reckless.

> I always felt a sense of betrayal when someone sought a new partner after their spouse dies.

Why?

right? I mean even the traditional marriage vows (which given the possibility of divorce aren't really to be taken literally) include the phrase "until death do us part", implying that you are free to find somebody else once your partner has died.

I think remaining unmarried after a death is mostly a function of the amount of effort it takes to build that connection again. For some it may seem preferable to keep true to a memory.

Oh, absolutely. I've never been married, but after my SO died, it was over a decade before I started dating again because I absolutely hate that part of starting a relationship.

Nice to know that mere friendship (in heavy doses) can do the same job. I thought this should be possible, but was worried it might not be.

It might depend on the person. I want in-person friendships and 24 people sounds like more than I could reasonably give attention to. And I want non-platonic things

IMHO, it's not promiscuity that is morally questionable, its promiscuity without the informed consent of all parties involved. Feynman had affairs with married women (presumably without their husbands' knowledge or consent) and students, over whom he held power and whose consent (assuming they did consent) cannot have been free from coercion. (He also flat-out lied to women to get them to sleep with him, which is also not OK.)

I think it's important to distinguish these situations because I think there are a lot of people going through a lot of emotional pain because they believe that any sex outside of a long-term monogamous relationship is morally questionable, and it's not. The challenge is that insuring that all parties have given informed consent is hard, but the emotional toll of throwing in the towel on this can be pretty high, so I think it can be an effort worth making. Certainly it's worthwhile telling people that it's OK to try.

    > I have about two dozen very close friends (both male and female)

That is incredible. I never have more than two at the same time! My social network is normally tiny.

Two dozen very close friends? That seems both obscene and absurd - I'd love to hear more.

I mean this seriously. Why not both? I don’t see the problem with having multiple types of relationships with people, including sex. As long as everyone is on the same page (consensual, they know it’s casual, etc.)

Sorry for your loss and glad you’re doing better.

I don't think strenholme is saying that those casual relationships are morally wrong, but that they're only facsimiles of the connection found in a deep and long relationship (especially one formed when young), and that pursuing facsimiles maybe brings you close enough to the original that you keep pursuing, but not close enough to ever approximate the original, and if what you miss is the original, then this is not a path to satisfaction.

Interesting point, but surely the reasoning that they are "only facsimiles of the connection found in a deep and long relationship" is a major argument for regarding them as morally wrong?

If you believe you have a moral duty to be the best person you can then passing up that opportunity in favour of the facsimiles is morally wrong.

> If you believe you have a moral duty to be the best person you can then passing up that opportunity in favour of the facsimiles is morally wrong

Maybe a better statement would be that casual connections only offer facsimiles of the depth of a deep and long relationship, because the sheer accumulation of time and experiences with another person cannot be replaced quickly. However, you can also say that a deep and long relationship only offers a facsimile of the breadth of many shorter relationships, as one person can only offer so many things. If you change your passionate pursuit every decade, finding a partner with the same one each time might make that pursuit more fruitful. It's not how I personally feel, but "best person" is subjective like that.

I don't think this follows unless you think there is something particularly special about sexual relations per se. I'm monogamous but I don't see why people should avoid casual sex.

> Why not both? I don’t see the problem with having multiple types of relationships with people, including sex.

May I suggest retiring to The Villages in FL? They seem to have the multiple partners thing worked out.

https://duckduckgo.com/?hps=1&q=the+villages+florida+sex&ia=...

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.

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...

This is a worthwhile read. Grief is really not as cut and dried as it's sometimes made out to be. As Lewis came around to understanding, and perhaps Feynman too, we had something special, something grand, and to remember is comforting.

Second this book! I read this at the behest of my wife after my dad died of cancer, and was really impactful for me.

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)

REPOSTED from deleted top level comment.

@dang I'm seeing that it was posted 7 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37914958

I appreciate the rules, but am very disappointed. There are some incredibly moving comments in here. I rarely feel as connected to the hacker news community as when reading these comments. The fact that it was erased off the front page for some rigid application of the rules, that leaves me with a bad taste.

For your consideration in the next cycle: pls consider valence of comments when determining dupes. If there is either an unfolding of (1) very valuable and new information, or (2) very sincere and vulnerable feelings, people might appreciate your bending the rules. thanks for considering

i agree with this. the problem with duplicates is that they often lead to repeating arguments that have already been hashed out in the previous discussions, and nothing new is being learned by repeating the same discussion after a short time.

however, this is only true if the actual content of the article is being discussed, and that is not the case here. we get discussions about loss, depression and other topics in that area every other month or so. and these discussions aren't so much about the articles themselves, but they invite people to share their personal stories that only relate to the article.

if it was the same people each time just repeating their stories, then it would make sense to call it a duplicate, but instead these posts open up a space for different people to share and deal with their grief and their struggles, which i think is worthwhile to allow more frequently than duplication rules would permit.

Ok, I've turned off the dupe marker on this one.

Thanks for being flexible with the rules! This is the first time I've seen this post, and I appreciated it.

Thank you Dang. I feel this is the right time to bring this discussion back, as HN has recently been having a lot of discussions about love, death, and loss. This discussion really isn’t only about the linked letter.

you are delightful. i appreciate you, dang

thank you. this was also my first time seeing this post, and it was a very heartwarming read, despite the undertone of melancholy.

thank you dang. this is a special topic and deserved the exception

Dang is a fantastic moderator (thanks for your services, @dang!), and yet I also agree with the parent poster that this thread has been special.

[No good rule without worthy exceptions ;-).]

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."

It’s incredible that they are so out of touch they see healthy introspection, and love as mental illness. This reminds me of when I had an actual bacterial infection, couldn’t get my Dr to prescribe antibiotics for it, so I got some on my own and they worked. When I pulled my medical records I saw in my chart something like “inappropriate off label use of prescription medications.”

How did you pull your medical records?

I believe it's a legal right to request them. I sent them an official form requesting them, and they sent them to me, as I wanted to transfer my old records to a new doctor. These were old style records, nowadays most of that stuff will be automatically on some type of web portal.

I think you can just ask your doctor for them? Why would someone deny you your own medical records?

I wasn't thinking that it would be denied. My curiosity was more with respect to how easy or difficult it is to request them.

How did you acquire the antibiotics?

In this case I already had them- I had previously pulled a muscle that was causing a lot of pain, and a doctor inappropriately prescribed me a course of antibiotics for a physical injury that couldn't possibly be an infection, so I never took them.

It really grates me that numerous times I've been inappropriately prescribed antibiotics- but the one time I had a dangerous and debilitating bacterial infection I was unable to obtain them.

However many human safe antibiotics are legal to buy for animal use, and many countries sell oral antibiotics for human use over the counter without a prescription. Please- if anyone is reading this, don't use antibiotics inappropriately. Ideally work with a doctor,but if not make sure you actually need them, and you take a full course in the proper dose to avoid creating dangerous resistant strains.

Yeah I don’t want to use them inappropriately. That being said I’ve gotten strep recently a couple times, and both times I wished I just had a few to start taking if the symptoms came on at night or over a weekend. That being said last time I had a sore throat it turned out to be Covid, and I was convinced I had strep again. So if I had my own antibiotics it’s possible I would’ve taken them inappropriately.

Well, people sure do talk about him, he was on point there. That's what we're doing now!

And why wouldn't he talk to himself? Clearly it would be a conversation with a much more interesting person than most people around him (and yes, I'm aware he worked on the Manhattan Project and the Challenger investigation).

I see two sides to this story.

By his own account, Feynman thought the psychiatrist was a bullshitter (I can see his point), turned the interview around, trolled him and presented a clearly adversarial attitude.

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).

It's an almost universal feeling, "I can't imagine who I'd use as emotional support", but if you end things I promise that you will find someone again. Not a replacement, but not a knockoff either, just different.

Some people don't find someone as good again though. Good spouses/friends/etc are not that replaceable.

Or rather, they're replacable practically, but the new persons are not necessarily offering the same level of connection.

You used an interesting view of "practical" :) Deep connection is not just some bonus, I think, but in fact the main practical thing about a relationship.

So I share your concern, but even so I'm not that worried. The deeper a connection you've been able to forge in the past, the better your chances of forging another deep connection.

This is twofold I think.

If having had a deep connection happened because you are in general someone easily capable of deep connection, it would be indeed easier to connect deeply again.

But if having a deep connection happened despite you not being such a person, but, e.g., because the person you lost had an equally rare disposition as you, or you lived through special circumstances that bonded you more deeply, it's probably harder to replicate this.

Need to forget this and feel trust at some point, this is the point of having a relationship IMO

> I promise that you will find someone again

Yeah, it's not that i fear that i'll be alone forever, i just believe that our connection is very special and strong as we came together as young adults and are now in our mid-twenties, so we kind of bonded and matured together through the pandemic, starting new jobs, getting degrees, going on vacations etc. we've experienced so much together that it'll take quite some time to get to know another person to the same level. And we don't even live together at the moment...

In all these years i can't think of a single fight or long-winded argument, if you exclude angryness caused by dehydration or hunger during stressful situations. we've got different skills and personality traits which add up. we've got the same idea on what makes for a comfortable evening or weekend. etc.

TL;DR - we're just a very good match. Of course there are aspects where we could match better, but i can only think of one or two small things.

This is not cringe at all IMO. It is the best thing that happened to me by far as well. Having someone to care about each other, feeling love and especially pure trust is really really priceless.

Hope you will be happy and together

Yeah, not sure why i think that others could find it cringe, as you say it's really one of the best things which can happen.

Thank you! Same for you, if that "best thing to happen" is still going on :)

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

That hit hard.

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

Just a note that the album represents a much more raw and unprocessed point of view - I wouldn't recommend it to anyone dealing with a recent loss.

THANK YOU. I'm listening to this now, and deciding what is appropriate to share with my family <3

This may be the most gut-wrenching album ever created. Gets me every time.

That entire album is such a massive emotional gut-punch.

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.

FWIW, I still "call" my sister. I pick up the phone and dial it. Pop my earbuds in. Then I just hit the button to lock the phone instead of the one to call the number. And we talk.

It's been 6.5 years since she was alive to answer the phone, but my heart knows her voice and what she would say. I don't always actually dial the actual phone these days, but we still catch up.

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

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.

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.

I think that once the author has passed, there's no harm to the publishing.

In fact, I'd argue that it shows us true human nature, unfiltered and unedited. If we'd only allowed what was meant to be public, we'd be losing perspective as works meant to be public are carefully crafted for that purpose.

Après moi, le déluge.

After I am dead, publish everything, correspondence, search history, location history, nude photos. I am dead, I cannot care.

You won't care, but the living will.

Funerals aren't meant for the deceased, they allow the living to mourn and move on. It may be irrational fears, but living people often fear what's gonna happen to them after they die, and respect for people extends after they die for most people. Not for everyone, but this means that some will feel uncomfortable about sharing private stuff. And then there's also superstition.

Speaking only for myself, it has been invaluable to have access to the private papers of people like my great grandfather. It provides a real connection to a man, time, and place which I couldn't know in person.

Perhaps publishing everything is a step too far, but things like semi-private diaries from a war or a voyage --- intended for immediate family to read, but not for publication --- are often okay to publish within living memory of the deceased. Sufficiently chaste love letters seem to me to be okay after a long enough time has elapsed, too.

Maybe the living will care, but maybe we should not care that they care.

After he died, the entire erotic oevre of the artist William Turner was destroyed by his family on grounds of taste. If they were half as profound and amazing as his landscapes, then this was an act of profound desacration.

Correspondences usually involve at least another person so please wait until both side are dead before publishing everything.

If that is what you wish, then absolutely, publish everything. Where I question the morality is in private correspondence, a persons dairy and things which was explicitly never wanted to be published.

There are movies, music and books which the creators specifically withheld from the world. Who are we to determine otherwise. Again I see no issue in researchers combing over half-written books, discarded sheet music or personal notes. I just think we should be respectful and keep things that was deliberately hidden from the world private. If an author leaves a 90% finished book and say they don't want it published, having family or publishers to going ahead, finishing it or publishing it in its half-finished state anyway after the death or the author doesn't sit right with me.

That's not to say that something like Feynman letter to his wife isn't beautiful, it is, very much so. It was just not meant for us, it was meant for himself and a woman who would never read it.

I'm not sure where this letter was first published, but Feynman's daughter edited a book of many of his letters private and professional: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfectly_Reasonable_Deviation...

I found it very beneficial to read recently so I'm grateful that his family chose to publish.

I enjoy "Letters of Note" and many of the most impactful letters are personal ones between private individuals.

Seconded. Letters of Note (there are various printed volumes as well, e.g. "Speeches of Note", "Letters of Notes: Cats", ...) are a very fine collection of thoughts.

One of my favorites is "Why explore space": https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/why-explore-space.

I agree in general, and enjoy reading things like this. But just because we enjoy something, it doesn't mean that it's right.

I'm very torn on this. As I said, I also enjoy reading things like this. But I always get the uncomfortable feeling that I'm reading someone's private diary without their consent.

If anyone believes people have a right to decide what information about them is made public, but believes they lose that right after death, I'd love to hear the argument for that.

For me, the basis for accepting the first proposition is that you buy in to self-determination as a value in and of itself, worth respecting not just because the person is around to stop you from doing whatever you want to them. In other words, if they ever had the right to say how they wanted to be treated, why do they lose that right after death?

As an example, if Bob one day told you that their name is now Alice, would you say "got, it Alice!" then go back to calling them Bob on the day they die? Why not? After all, what do they care, they're dead! To me, this sounds like a variation of the same argument against respecting someone's privacy after death, and bothers me for the same reason.

I think the answer is buried somewhere in the mists of...time. Put another way, there is a temporal degree of respect for the dead, i.e. can you and for how long put the wishes of the dead above those of the living.

Of course, for immediate death, as others have noted, there are plenty of "stakeholders", family members, etc. who have direct interest in the wishes of the dead being upheld (not having their communications exposed, as others have noted). These needs must be considered, but eventually those grandchildren will also themselves pass, and those stakes will have also vanished.

Even for immediate death, the wishes of the dead can be invalid and ir-respected, such as in the case of a suicide bomber or a recently deceased captor/dictator.

On the flip side, for those dead (tens of) thousands of years, we engage in a practice known as archeology, that I think you would have a hard time arguing the opposite - the information we glean from their table scraps is too valuable to worry about their death wishes, assuming they had any.

In the great in-between, then, the question is, whose wishes matter more? Those of the deceased or those of the living. Usually, those of the living. And it is generally in our interest that we not disturb the dead too much, because at least we would like to live in a society that continues to grow, and does not need to disturb them (too much), respect our own wishes, etc. But ultimately, once it can be said it no longer harms any living, or any future living, then the desires of the living trump the desires of the deceased.

Like in all situations, I think this ultimately comes down to the circumstances and consequences. Rights are, in the end, mere principals which may help us make good decisions. At least, I've never observed a right descend from platonic space and intervene in the real world to prevent itself from being violated. If the benefits are sufficient and the consequences small enough ignoring a dead person's wishes seems like not that big of a deal to me. Its hard to see the point or benefit of misgendering a person after they have died (ceteris paribus) but sometimes a person's private writings are of large value to the rest of the world and they are, after all, dead.

Because you are dead. You have ceased to be and your wishes no longer bind the living beyond the division of your assets, and even then that is only because of bitter legal argument between the survivors of an estate.

That's not an absolute truth, that's just what you believe. I happen to believe the opposite, that a person's death does not cancel our obligations toward that person or that person's wishes.

> You have ceased to be and your wishes no longer bind the living beyond the division of your assets

Why are assets special? Why do you draw the line there? A more consistent position would be that we're free to ignore a decedent's last will and testament because they're dead and their wishes no longer matter. But if we believe in the importance in honoring someone's will, then I think we should honor any agreement or social norm that was in effect while they were alive.

Privacy and decency are weird notions for a lots of people nowadays who rather generate money by disclosing online everything private about their lives.

I agree with the sentiment, but Meditations was always written to be published though. It was less a private journal and more a write-as-you-go self help book. Marcus (Marky to his friends) hoped his writings would be read widely as it would spread his thoughts on stoicism etc.

I assume this is a joke or satire, given the 'Marky' bit? Meditations was absolutely not written to be published. Not only does he say (and imply through omission and other statements) some pretty damaging things about powerful people whose continued support he needed to rule effectively, much of it has very specific personal context that nobody but himself has ever been able to understand or interpret. A lot of it is referencing past events from his life that he doesn't explain, so is meaningless to anyone but himself. He talks a lot about admiring people whose names and specifics he never mentions, and then massively insults people like Herodes Atticus through omission (and negative anecdotes that imply him), someone who was a famous and powerful intellectual at the time, and a tutor that was a big part of his life- he had a lot to say about what he admired about his other tutors.

This is history. The more we know, the better.

If you think it's "too soon" then let's wait until his stuff gets dispersed hundreds of years after his death like has happened for every historical figure until recently. I'm sure 2236 historians will love it.

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.

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

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.

It's worth reading Feynman's Personal Observations on Reliability of Shuttle, published as part of the Rogers Commission Report.

https://www.nasa.gov/history/rogersrep/v2appf.htm

> "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

It has come out more recently (2019) that Sally Ride was putting him on the trail. He acted the irascible dogged investigating scientist, and she got the astronauts' worries about shuttle program specifics out to the public.

To add to what others said, I believe his biggest contribution to the Challenger investigation (beyond his insight and damning conclusions) was that he refused to censor himself and his report for political or public-relations reasons. IIRC he said if he weren't allowed to publish his part of the report in the way he wanted, the commission was to remove his name from the report entirely, because he didn't want to be associated with a report that pulled punches.

He was involved in the investigation committee, but of course wasn't the only one there. IIRC Neil Armstrong was also on the committee. I figure that part of the point of choosing them was to lend the committee credibility with the public. The public would probably trust that the findings were above board if they were supported by the first man on the Moon and one of the most prominent physicists of the time.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Beautiful. Leave this mark on someone.

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.

Did anyone else guess it was Feynman before clicking?

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...

It's beautiful :))

That's hard.

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