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Los Angeles novelist and UCLA professor Mona Simpson has had little to say publicly about the death of Steve Jobs, the brother she became close with after both were grown. She breaks her silence in Sunday's NYT, reprinting the eulogy she delivered at his memorial service at Stanford. Excerpt:
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.{skip]
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.”
She ends with her brother's last words. The NYT also runs a piece from Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson, proclaiming that in his judgment Jobs was a genius: "His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. They were sparked by intuition, not analytic rigor."
Updated post
Previously on LA Observed:
Steve Jobs, inventor was 56
Jobs spent last weeks saying goodbye
LA Sketchbook: Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs' 2005 commencement speech at Stanford