I
grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because
we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated
from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I
hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our
lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us.
Later, after I’d met my father, I tried to believe he’d
changed his number and left no forwarding address
because he was an idealistic revolutionary, plotting a
new world for the Arab people.
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.
By then, I lived in New York, where I
was trying to write my first novel. I had a job at a
small magazine in an office the size of a closet, with
three other aspiring writers. When one day a lawyer
called me — me, the middle-class girl from California
who hassled the boss to buy us health insurance — and
said his client was rich and famous and was my long-lost
brother, the young editors went wild. This was 1985 and
we worked at a cutting-edge literary magazine, but I’d
fallen into the plot of a Dickens novel and really, we
all loved those best. The lawyer refused to tell me my
brother’s name and my colleagues started a betting pool.
The leading candidate: John Travolta. I 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 and handsomer than
Omar Sharif.
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.
I didn’t know much about computers. I
still worked on a manual Olivetti typewriter.
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.
I want to tell you a few things I
learned from Steve, during three distinct periods, over
the 27 years I knew him. They’re not periods of years,
but of states of being. His full life. His illness. His
dying.
Steve worked at what he loved. He
worked really hard. Every day.
That’s incredibly simple, but true.
He was the opposite of absent-minded.
He was never embarrassed about working
hard, even if the results were failures. If someone as
smart as Steve wasn’t ashamed to admit trying, maybe I
didn’t have to be.
When he got kicked out of Apple, things
were painful. He told me about a dinner at which 500
Silicon Valley leaders met the then-sitting president.
Steve hadn’t been invited.
He was hurt but he still went to work
at Next. Every single day.
Novelty was not Steve’s highest value.
Beauty was.
For an innovator, Steve was remarkably
loyal. If he loved a shirt, he’d order 10 or 100 of
them. In the Palo Alto house, there are probably enough
black cotton turtlenecks for everyone in this church.
He didn’t favor trends or gimmicks. He
liked people his own age.
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.
He was willing to be misunderstood.
Uninvited to the ball, he drove the
third or fourth iteration of his same black sports car
to Next, where he and his team were quietly inventing
the platform on which Tim Berners-Lee would write the
program for the World Wide Web.
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?”
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.”
When Reed was born, he began gushing
and never stopped. He was a physical dad, with each of
his children. He fretted over Lisa’s boyfriends and
Erin’s travel and skirt lengths and Eve’s safety around
the horses she adored.
None of us who attended Reed’s
graduation party will ever forget the scene of Reed and
Steve slow dancing.
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.
Steve had been successful at a young
age, and he felt that had isolated him. Most of the
choices he made from the time I knew him were designed
to dissolve the walls around him. A middle-class boy
from Los Altos, he fell in love with a middle-class girl
from New Jersey. It was important to both of them to
raise Lisa, Reed, Erin and Eve as grounded, normal
children. Their house didn’t intimidate with art or
polish; in fact, for many of the first years I knew
Steve and Lo together, dinner was served on the grass,
and sometimes consisted of just one vegetable. Lots of
that one vegetable. But one. Broccoli. In season. Simply
prepared. With just the right, recently snipped, herb.
Even as a young millionaire, Steve
always picked me up at the airport. He’d be standing
there in his jeans.
When a family member called him at
work, his secretary Linetta answered, “Your dad’s in a
meeting. Would you like me to interrupt him?”
When Reed insisted on dressing up as a
witch every Halloween, Steve, Laurene, Erin and Eve all
went wiccan.
They once embarked on a kitchen
remodel; it took years. They cooked on a hotplate in the
garage. The Pixar building, under construction during
the same period, finished in half the time. And that was
it for the Palo Alto house. The bathrooms stayed old.
But — and this was a crucial distinction — it had been a
great house to start with; Steve saw to that.
This is not to say that he didn’t enjoy
his success: he enjoyed his success a lot, just minus a
few zeros. He told me how much he loved going to the
Palo Alto bike store and gleefully realizing he could
afford to buy the best bike there.
And he did.
Steve was humble. Steve liked to keep
learning.
Once, he told me if he’d grown up
differently, he might have become a mathematician. He
spoke reverently about colleges and loved walking around
the Stanford campus. 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.
Steve cultivated whimsy. What other
C.E.O. knows the history of English and Chinese tea
roses and has a favorite David Austin rose?
He had surprises tucked in all his
pockets. I’ll venture that Laurene will discover treats
— songs he loved, a poem he cut out and put in a drawer
— even after 20 years of an exceptionally close
marriage. I spoke to him every other day or so, but when
I opened The New York Times and saw a feature on the
company’s patents, I was still surprised and delighted
to see a sketch for a perfect staircase.
With his four children, with his wife,
with all of us, Steve had a lot of fun.
He treasured happiness.
Then, Steve became ill and we watched
his life compress into a smaller circle. Once, he’d
loved walking through Paris. He’d discovered a small
handmade soba shop in Kyoto. He downhill skied
gracefully. He cross-country skied clumsily. No more.
Eventually, even ordinary pleasures,
like a good peach, no longer appealed to him.
Yet, what amazed me, and what I learned
from his illness, was how much was still left after so
much had been taken away.
I remember my brother learning to walk
again, with a chair. After his liver transplant, once a
day he would get up on legs that seemed too thin to bear
him, arms pitched to the chair back. He’d push that
chair down the Memphis hospital corridor towards the
nursing station and then he’d sit down on the chair,
rest, turn around and walk back again. He counted his
steps and, each day, pressed a little farther.
Laurene got down on her knees and
looked into his eyes.
“You can do this, Steve,” she said. His
eyes widened. His lips pressed into each other.
He tried. He always, always tried, and
always with love at the core of that effort. He was an
intensely emotional man.
I realized during that terrifying time
that Steve was not enduring the pain for himself. He set
destinations: his son Reed’s graduation from high
school, his daughter Erin’s trip to Kyoto, the launching
of a boat he was building on which he planned to take
his family around the world and where he hoped he and
Laurene would someday retire.
Even ill, his taste, his discrimination
and his judgment held. He went through 67 nurses before
finding kindred spirits and then he completely trusted
the three who stayed with him to the end. Tracy. Arturo.
Elham.
One time when Steve had contracted a
tenacious pneumonia his doctor forbid everything — even
ice. We were in a standard I.C.U. unit. Steve, who
generally disliked cutting in line or dropping his own
name, confessed that this once, he’d like to be treated
a little specially.
I told him: Steve, this is special
treatment.
He leaned over to me, and said: “I want
it to be a little more special.”
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. He redrew that not-quite-special-enough
hospital unit. And every time his wife walked into the
room, I watched his smile remake itself on his face.
For the really big, big things, you
have to trust me, he wrote on his sketchpad. He looked
up. You have to.
By that, he meant that we should
disobey the doctors and give him a piece of ice.
None of us knows for certain how long
we’ll be here. On Steve’s better days, even in the last
year, he embarked upon projects and elicited promises
from his friends at Apple to finish them. Some boat
builders in the Netherlands have a gorgeous stainless
steel hull ready to be covered with the finishing wood.
His three daughters remain unmarried, his two youngest
still girls, and he’d wanted to walk them down the aisle
as he’d walked me the day of my wedding.
We all — in the end — die in medias
res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.
I suppose it’s not quite accurate to
call the death of someone who lived with cancer for
years unexpected, but Steve’s death was unexpected for
us.
What I learned from my brother’s death
was that character is essential: What he was, was how he
died.
Tuesday morning, he called me to ask me
to hurry up to Palo Alto. His tone was affectionate,
dear, loving, but like someone whose luggage was already
strapped onto the vehicle, who was already on the
beginning of his journey, even as he was sorry, truly
deeply sorry, to be leaving us.
He started his farewell and I stopped
him. I said, “Wait. I’m coming. I’m in a taxi to the
airport. I’ll be there.”
“I’m telling you now because I’m afraid
you won’t make it on time, honey.”
When I arrived, he and his Laurene were
joking together like partners who’d lived and worked
together every day of their lives. He looked into his
children’s eyes as if he couldn’t unlock his gaze.
Until about 2 in the afternoon, his
wife could rouse him, to talk to his friends from Apple.
Then, after awhile, it was clear that
he would no longer wake to us.
His breathing changed. It became
severe, deliberate, purposeful. I could feel him
counting his steps again, pushing farther than before.
This is what I learned: he was working
at this, too. Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved
it.
He told me, when he was saying goodbye
and telling me he was sorry, so sorry we wouldn’t be
able to be old together as we’d always planned, that he
was going to a better place.
Dr. Fischer gave him a 50/50 chance of
making it through the night.
He made it through the night, Laurene
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 heave a deep breath and
begin again.
This had to be done. Even now, he had a
stern, still handsome profile, the profile of an
absolutist, a romantic. His breath indicated an arduous
journey, some steep path, altitude.
He seemed to be climbing.
But with that will, that work ethic,
that strength, there was also sweet Steve’s capacity for
wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still
more beautiful later.
Steve’s final words, hours earlier,
were monosyllables, repeated three 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.
www.fwdinnovations.net
