Steve Jobs' sister recounts lessons from her brother's life

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. 

HARD WORKER 


Steve worked at what he loved. He worked really hard. Every day. 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." 


HUMBLE AND FUN-LOVING 


Steve was humble. Steve liked to keep learning. 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 crosscountry 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. 


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. 


LESSONS FROM DEATH 


We all, in the end, die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories. 
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