New York: Novelist Mona Simpson gave the eulogy at the Memorial Church of Stanford University on October 16. She said Jobs looked at her, then his children, then his wife and then beyond them all, saying: “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.”
“Steve’s final words were monosyllables, repeated three times,” Simpson said according to the eulogy printed in the New York Times.
“Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them, before saying his final words.”
Jobs, the founder of Apple and the man who transformed consumer technology, died on Oct 5 at the age of 56.
He had fought cancer in recent years and received a liver transplant in 2009. He stepped down as Apple’s chief executive in August, but his death still came as a shock to many in Silicon Valley and across the world.
Simpson, 54, said that, as he was dying, he seemed to be climbing. “His breath indicated an arduous journey, some steep path, altitude,” she said.
“Laurene [his wife] next to him on the bed sometimes jerked up when there was a longer pause between his breaths.
“She and I looked at each other, then he would have a deep breath and begin again.”
The day before his death, Jobs called Simpson, a professor of English at the University of California, to tell her to “hurry up to Palo Alto” and that he was “sorry, truly deeply sorry, to be leaving us”.
Simpson first met Jobs when she was 25 after Jobs found his birth mother, Joanne Schieble Simpson. She said her first impression of Jobs was “a guy my age in jeans, Arab or Jewish looking and handsomer than Omar Sharif. He explained that he worked in computers.
“I told Steve I’d recently considered my first purchase of a computer: something called the Cromemco.
“Steve told me it was a good thing I’d waited. He said he was making something that was going to be insanely beautiful.”
She said: “Love was his supreme virtue, his god of gods. He tracked and worried about the romantic lives of the people working with him.
“I remember when he phoned the day he met his wife Laurene. He said: ‘There’s this beautiful woman and she’s really smart and she has this dog and I’m going to marry her’.”
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