New Delhi: Steve Jobs' final words were: OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW. This was told by his biological sister Novelist Mona Simpson, who shared a eulogy for her brother Jobs. Her eulogy, published by The New York Times, has offered a close look at the last moments before Jobs died.
She said, "Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother."
Simpson got to know about his brother when they both were adults. One day, a lawyer called Simpson in 1985 and notified that her long-lost brother was 'rich and famous'. The lawyer refused to tell her brother's name and then her colleagues started a betting pool. The leading candidate: John Travolta. She secretly hoped for a literary descendant of Henry James - someone more talented than I, someone brilliant without even trying.
"When I met Steve, he was a guy my age in jeans, Arab- or Jewish-looking," she said. "We took a long walk — something, it happened, that we both liked to do. I don’t remember much of what we said that first day, only that he felt like someone I’d pick to be a friend. He explained that he worked in computers."
Simpsoon shares a few things that she learned from Jobs, during three distinct periods: his full life, his illness and his dying, which she calls "states of being".
She said, "Steve worked at what he loved. He worked really hard. He was the opposite of absent-minded." He was never embarrassed about working hard, even if the results were failures." According to Simpson, "Novelty was not Steve’s highest value. Beauty was."
Jobs also didn’t favor trends or gimmicks, in fact he liked people his own age.
"Steve was like a girl in the amount of time he spent talking about love. Love was his supreme virtue, his god of gods. He tracked and worried about the romantic lives of the people working with him."
When Reed was born, he began gushing and never stopped. He was a physical dad, with each of his children. None of us who attended Reed’s graduation party will ever forget the scene of Reed and Steve slow dancing, said Simpson.
Simpson further said, "Steve was humble. Steve liked to keep learning."
When Steve became ill, his family "watched his life compress into a smaller circle", mentioned Simpson. What Simpson learned from his illness was that how much was still left after so much had been taken away. Jobs had to relearn how to walk again, after his liver transplant. "He tried. He always, always tried, and always with love at the core of that effort. He was an intensely emotional man."
Even during that terrifying time, Steve was not enduring the pain for himself. he was enduring pain for his family.
"Intubated, when he couldn’t talk, he asked for a notepad. He sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed. He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment." And every time his wife walked into the room, I watched his smile remake itself on his face, said Simpson.
Struggling hard, Jobs passed away on October 5 at the age of 56 after a years-long fight with cancer. He had no formal schooling in engineering, yet he's listed as the inventor or co-inventor on more than 300 US patents.
The beauty of Apple products secured Steve Jobs a place in history long before his death, but design professionals said the depth of his influence on their profession goes much deeper than the minimalist look of an iPhone. The Mac and the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, born out of his vision of marrying high technology with an elegant and simple form, are already recognised as iconic products of the digital age.
He helped change computers from a geeky hobbyist's obsession to a necessity of modern life at work and home, and in the process he upended not just personal technology but the cellphone and music industries.
Steve’s final words were: OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.
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