Hey, it’s Marie.
I don’t really know how to write this. I’ve started this letter four times and I keep stopping.
Pierre is dead. He was crossing a street in the rain. A horse-drawn carriage came around the corner. He slipped, fell under the wheels, and was killed instantly. They came to tell me and I kept asking them to repeat it because the sentence didn’t make sense.
I went to identify him. His head was — I don’t want to describe it. It was Pierre and it wasn’t Pierre. I sat with him for a long time.
We’d won the Nobel Prize together the year before. The first woman to ever receive one. People kept congratulating me and all I wanted was to get back to the lab with Pierre. The prize was nice but it wasn’t the point. The work was the point, and the work only made sense because he was next to me.
I keep finding his handwriting around the apartment. Little calculations on scraps of paper. I found one in his coat pocket yesterday — some equation, half finished. He was going to finish it when he got home. He never got home.
I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now. People keep bringing food and telling me how sorry they are and I want them all to leave. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. I started a diary just to have somewhere to put all of this. The first entry is just me writing to him. Telling him it’s raining again. Telling him I can’t understand how the world keeps going when he’s not in it.
The Sorbonne offered me Pierre’s teaching position — his chair in physics. I know why. If it were up to them, a woman would never hold that position. But Pierre is dead and the only person alive who understands his work well enough to continue it is his wife. They had no choice, and I don’t care. I’m taking it.
Yesterday I walked into his lecture hall for the first time. Five hundred people in the audience — students, professors, journalists, people off the street. Everyone wanted to see the widow try to fill her dead husband’s shoes. I could feel them watching. Some with sympathy, some with curiosity, some just waiting to see if I’d fall apart.
I stood at the front of the room, opened Pierre’s notes to his last lecture, found the exact sentence where he stopped. And I picked up from there. Mid-sentence. As if he’d just stepped out and I was continuing for him. No introduction, no speech about grief or loss. I just started teaching.
The room went completely silent. A few people cried. I didn’t.
I’m not doing this for the Sorbonne. I’m doing this because Pierre and I were in the middle of something and I’m not finished.
The shed is quiet now. My hands still have chemical burns. Our equipment is still set up exactly how we left it. I haven’t moved anything of his.
I’m going to keep going.
— Marie
