Steve Jobs’s last words: “Oh wow”

By Kim Do-yeun

The final words of Apple’s widely admired co-founder at his deathbed were “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.”

His sister Mona Simpson revealed Steve Jobs’s last moments in her eulogy, published in the New York Times on Sunday.

Jobs’s final words showed his “capacity for wonderment” even as he drew his last breaths.

During his final hours, he had looked at his wife Laurene and each of his children, then past their shoulders into empty space, while his breathing grew more effortful.

Simpson, who is a novelist and professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, depicted her brother as a passionate man who showed a deep capacity for love, as much as he was relentless in his work.

Simpson had met him for the first time in 1985 ― some 20 years after Jobs was adopted while she grew up with their single mother.

She recalled the first time they had met, describing young Jobs as “handsomer than Omar Sharif.” She had imagined that their Syrian father, whom they had never known, looked like the Egyptian actor who starred in “Doctor Zhivago.”

Jobs had confided in her as he was fired from his own company that year. He had been left out in an invitation list for a dinner given by Apple to 500 Silicon Valley leaders.

His passion and resilience, however, could not be put out.

Even as he lay frail, the innovator had been sketching devices such as an iPad holder for hospital beds, new fluid monitors and hospital equipments.

Simpson also told of Jobs’s devotion to his wife and children. He fought his illness as he oversaw the construction of a boat on which he dreamed of taking his family around the world.

His last breathing efforts reminded Simpson of the time he was learning to walk again after his liver transplant. He had counted his steps, and each day, he would walk a little more than the day before.

Remembering how her brother had worked his every breath in his final moments, Simpson said in the eulogy that “Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it.”