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You know how it always is,

every new idea,

it takes a generation or two

until it becomes obvious

that there’s no real problem….

I cannot define the real problem,

therefore I suspect there’s no real problem,

but I’m not sure

there’s no real problem.

In October 1987 another abdominal tumor appeared, and his doctors made one last attempt to stall his cancer surgically. When the Los Angeles Times sent him an advance copy of his obituary, he thanked the author but said, “I have decided it is not a very good idea for a man to read it ahead of time: it takes the element of surprise out of it.” He knew he was not recovering. He was sixty-nine years old. Pain wracked one of his legs. He was exhausted. He had no appetite. In January he began awakening in the night with sweats and chills. In one corner of his dusty office blackboard he had written a pair of self-conscious mottoes: “What I cannot create I do not understand” and “Know how to solve every problem that has been solved.” Nearby was a running list under the heading, “TO LEARN” (“Bethe Ansatz Prob., 2D Hall …”). Physics changed; he talked about it once with his old Los Alamos friend Stanislaw Ulam, who had been watching a few white clouds roll against the blue New Mexico sky. Feynman seemed to read his mind: “It is really like the shape of clouds,” he said. “As one watches them they don’t seem to change, but if you look back a minute later, it is all very different.” He had not accumulated much: a hand-knitted scarf, hanging on a peg, from some students in Yugoslavia; a photograph of Michelle with her cello; some black-and-white pictures of the aurora borealis; his deep leather recliner; a sketch he had made of Dirac; a van painted with chocolate-brown Feynman diagrams. On February 3 he entered the UCLA Medical Center again.

Doctors in the intensive care unit discovered a ruptured duodenal ulcer. They administered antibiotics. But his remaining kidney had failed. One round of dialysis was performed, with little effect. Feynman refused the further dialysis that might have prolonged his life for weeks or months. He told Michelle calmly, “I’m going to die,” in a tone that said: I have decided. He was watched and guarded now by the three women who had loved him longest: Gweneth, Joan, and his cousin Frances Lewine, who had lived with him in the house in Far Rockaway. Morphine for pain and an oxygen tube were their last concessions to medicine. The doctors said it would take about five days. He had watched one death before—trying to be scientific, observing the descent into coma and the sporadic breathing, imagining the brain clouding as it was starved of oxygen. He had anticipated his own—toying with the release of consciousness in dark sensory-deprivation tanks, telling a friend that he had now taught people most of the good stuff he knew, and making his peace with bottomless nature:

You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here… .

I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell. It doesn’t frighten me.

He drifted toward unconsciousness. His eyes dimmed. Speech became an exertion. Gweneth watched as he drew himself together, prepared a phrase, and released it: “I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.” After that, he tried to communicate by shifting his head or squeezing the hand that clasped his. Shortly before midnight on February 15, 1988, his body gasped for air that the oxygen tube could not provide, and his space in the world closed. An imprint remained: what he knew; how he knew.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I never met Feynman.