14 DAY TRIAL // Novelist Mona Simpson, sister of the late Steve Jobs, has issued a truly touching eulogy for her brother, speaking about his life, his love for the beautiful, and his last days among the living.
The eulogy was delivered to the New York Times by Mona Simpson, whom Jobs met when she was around 25.
The novelist paints a picture of how Steve Jobs impacted her life and made her come to realize that he worked harder than anyone ever knew, only to achieve beautiful results.
“He was the opposite of absent-minded,” Simpson said. “...Novelty was not Steve’s highest value. Beauty was.”
“His philosophy of aesthetics reminds me of a quote that went something like this: ‘Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later’. Steve always aspired to make beautiful later,” she said. “He was willing to be misunderstood.”
Much like Isaacson’s biography reveals, Mona Simpson said “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.”
“Whenever he saw a man he thought a woman might find dashing, he called out, ‘Hey are you single? Do you wanna come to dinner with my sister?’”
Mona recalls Steve Jobs calling her one day, saying: “There’s this beautiful woman and she’s really smart and she has this dog and I’m going to marry her.” The woman in question was Laurene Powell, his wife-to-be.
“His abiding love for Laurene sustained him. He believed that love happened all the time, everywhere. In that most important way, Steve was never ironic, never cynical, never pessimistic. I try to learn from that, still,” said Simpson.
Of his final days, Simpson said: “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. “Steve’s final words were: OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.”