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

That's hard.

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 [1]: https://medium.com/@patcon/reflections-on-the-evolved-patter...

> 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.

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)

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.