'OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW'
Love, last words, and later: Steve Jobs' sister's eulogy reveals far more indeath than we knew in life
What do you get when you cross the untimely death of one of the most brilliant men of our time with a best-selling novelist sister?
Why, only one of the most beautiful eulogies ever written.
Originally delivered at a service on Oct. 16, the farewell story penned by Mona Simpson, writer and sister of former Apple CEO and founder Steve Jobs, was published in the New York Times on Sunday. In it, Simpson pulls back the veil on her relationship with her older brother — a brother she did not know she had until she was a quarter of the way through her life.
"In the last year of his life, he studied a book of paintings by Mark Rothko, an artist he hadn’t known about before, thinking of what could inspire people on the walls of a future Apple campus," Simpson said.
"Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me," Simpson said. "For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother."
You see, Jobs and Simpson didn't share a traditional sibling story. While their parents — an American mother and a Syrian father — gave up Jobs for adoption, they later married and had Simpson. Simpson wasn't aware she had a brother until she was contacted by an attorney who said "his client was rich and famous and was my long-lost brother."
If that fairy tale doesn't make you tear up, check your pulse.
Simpson went on to eloquently and movingly describe a humble man of incredible work ethic with a hunger for learning, a penchant for "cultivating whimsy," and a very human dedication to his life's focal point — love.
"Steve was like a girl in the amount of time he spent talking about love," Simpson said. "Love was his supreme virtue, his god of gods. I remember when he phoned the day he met Laurene. 'There’s this beautiful woman and she’s really smart and she has this dog and I’m going to marry her.'"
Betcha didn't know that about the master of Mac, did you?
His unyielding interest in the aesthetic might've even led him to Houston — had Jobs had more time.
"In the last year of his life, he studied a book of paintings by Mark Rothko, an artist he hadn’t known about before, thinking of what could inspire people on the walls of a future Apple campus," Simpson said.
Hey, we know that guy.
It seems that so many secrets are revealed once the realm of the living is vacated. Just when you think you know a person, the person goes and dies on you — and you learn so much more in death than you ever did in life.
"We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories," said Simpson.
Jobs' story — "the wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later" — ended with two words, uttered over and over again.
"Steve's final words were, 'OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW,'" Simpson said.
After a life like his, what else could you say?
