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Comment by larrys | Hacker News Reader

"but rather the unhealthy manner in which he'd internalized his grief."

I look at it differently. I just think he didn't want to be annoyed by a bunch of standard "sorry to hear about your loss" that many people receive when someone hears about their loss.

He said:

"I didn’t know how I was going to face all my friends at Los Alamos. I didn’t want people with long faces talking to me about the death of Arlene. "

To me "long faces" is the key. The long faces make him feel uncomfortable. Just like many people are comfortable singing in front of their parents and friends and showing emotions and others are not.

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You're saying the same thing in a different way. He repressed his grief because he couldn't cope with it. It wasn't a healthy reaction.

It was an understandable and normal reaction, given his youth and the pressure he was under, but it wasn't likely good for his mental health.

actually he didn't repress his grief. he understood that grief for her doesn't change that she's dead, and other people bugging him about her death doesn't make it any better. So he decides he might as well just continue doing what he was doing, because how he deals with her death is not his colleagues concern

Have you read Genius by Gleick? His response to his wife's death was to frenziedly throw himself into work and systematically abuse women. The idea that his grief was not being repressed doesn't stand up.

Again, very understandable in an ambitious young man growing up in the shadow of war with all that responsibility on his shoulders. But not what you'd call a healthy grieving process.

>and systematically abuse women

Really?

it's the code word for "any interaction with women i do not approve of"

You can read the bios yourself. After Arline he went on his "debug how to sleep with women binge" and then slept with his students' wives. Most complained that none of them could live up to his dead wife, and the more ill-treated ones wrote to the others saying that the best way to get out of a Feynman relationship was to make a few dollars by claiming to have missed your period.

This is all passed over quite briefly in Genius, but you'll find more evidence elsewhere.

i would like to know what is a healthy grieving process.

Any correlation made by glieck with his way of living is purely his own interpretation of things, and not feynman's. So, you idea that the idea of grief not being repressed doesn't stand up doesn't stand up (yes, read that sentence carefully).

You are not his mind, nor a psychic (no, not psychotherapist) to tell why he did what he did.

If you ever read his "autobiographies" you'll see he's been very well received by women around him (since his princeton years), not after arlene's death.

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