“I love my wife. My wife is dead.”

Here’s an extraordinarily touching letter (kindly brought to my attention by Charles Steinman) from what might seem an unlikely source — the staunchly atheistic, fiercely honest, remarkably brilliant Nobel-laureate Caltech physicist Richard Feynman:

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/02/i-love-my-wife-my-wife-is-dead.html

I never met him myself, but, because Caltech wasn’t far from where I grew up, some in my circles did.  (I may once or twice, without knowing it, have seen him playing the bongo drums at a little nightclub on Colorado Boulevard.  But I’m not sure.)

Anyway, I hope and believe that he was pleasantly surprised about twenty-seven years ago.