14 DAY TRIAL // The Internet is abuzz with speculation regarding Steve Jobs’ last words before passing away under the watchful eyes of his family. It appears that a syntagm as simple as “Oh Wow” can be interpreted in an infinite number of ways, but only one of them is what some may wish to hear.
There is a lot of debate as to what Steve Jobs meant when he said ‘Oh Wow’ three consecutive times right before he passed away on October 5th, 2011.
The information comes from his sister’s eulogy, via 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. Steve’s final words were:
OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.”
The simplest explaination (and probably the most plausible one too) is that Steve’s exclamation was directed at his loving family. Perhaps Steve was proud to have such beautiful children carry on his legacy. Any proud father would say 'oh wow' to that, I'm sure.
But some are theorizing that Jobs had already begun crossing over to ‘the other side’ which caused him to speak those words out loud.
Jobs himself had admitted to biographer Walter Isaacson that, despite being mostly non-religious, he often found himself contemplating life after death.
This thinking had intensified recently, mostly because of the cancer eating away at his life.
But there’s something else in that biography of Isaacson’s that caught my eye. Jobs told his biographer that he believed there should be something after physical life.
His reasoning was simple: he believed it would be a great loss of "experience" to simply have the lights turned off. He wasn’t speaking of himself in particular.