Feynman's Heart-breaking Letter to His Deceased Wife

This is a letter the physicist Richard Feynman wrote to his wife 17 months after she passed. 

Feynman was a young physicist at Los Alamos, New Mexico during the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. He was a junior scientist put in charge of the calculating division, the "human calculators" doing all the arithmetic that needed done, especially complicated integrals. 

(Sothebys confirms)

A little about his marriage, from Wikipedia:

One of the conditions of Feynman's scholarship to Princeton was that he could not be married; nevertheless, he continued to see his high school sweetheart, Arline Greenbaum, and was determined to marry her once he had been awarded his PhD despite the knowledge that she was seriously ill with tuberculosis. This was an incurable disease at the time, and she was not expected to live more than two years. On June 29, 1942, they took the ferry to Staten Island, where they were married in the city office. The ceremony was attended by neither family nor friends and was witnessed by a pair of strangers. Feynman could kiss Arline only on the cheek. After the ceremony he took her to Deborah Hospital, where he visited her on weekends.

Oppenheimer recruited Feynman for Los Alamos. He was there by late March 1943.

Oppenheimer recruited many young physicists, including Feynman, whom he telephoned long distance from Chicago to inform that he had found a Presbyterian sanatorium in Albuquerque, New Mexico for Arline. They were among the first to depart for New Mexico, leaving on a train on March 28, 1943. The railroad supplied Arline with a wheelchair, and Feynman paid extra for a private room for her. There they spent their wedding anniversary.

Feynman visited his wife in Albuquerque every weekend. Even today it's a two-hour drive from Los Alamos to Albuquerque. Back then, when the roads weren't nearly as good, especially from Los Alamos to Santa Fe, it must have taken him several hours to travel to see his wife. 

She died in June 1945. 

The Trinity test at White Sands, New Mexico was July 16, 1945, and of course the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

[BTW, I once met and talked with the guy who set off the Trinity bomb--Joseph McKibben, who was in charge of the detonation electronics. Another time.]

Talk about a love story!! Feynman couldn't have been more devoted to his sweetheart and wife, despite all the difficulties and turmoil in both their lives at the time. 

Here's a picture of them:

As I was writing this I thought, wow, this would make a great screenplay, but then I though I had once seen such a movie, and sure enough there is one, from 1996:

But Matthew Broderick as Richard Feynman? Eh.