MISSING PIECES

Mona Simpson’s Eulogy: The Steve Jobs We Didn’t Know

By Elizabeth C.

YOU DON’T MALIGN THE DEAD AT THEIR FUNERAL. So it’s tempting to discount Mona Simpson’s touching eulogy of her brother Steve Jobs as romance.

Simpson, a writer whose memorial tribute to Jobs was published yesterday in the New York Times, paints him in very different colors from those used in the thousands of articles that came before and after his death. She describes him as a loving brother, father and husband who was “never ironic, never cynical, never pessimistic,” a man who “cultivated whimsy.”

“With his four children, with his wife, with all of us, Steve had a lot of fun. He treasured happiness,”’ writes Simpson, a novelist who met Jobs when she was 25.

Unmarried when Jobs was born, his parents gave him up for adoption; Simpson was their second child born after they wed, but the couple ultimately divorced.

Simpson first met her brother after she got a call from a lawyer on behalf of his rich and famous client.

“Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me,” Simpson confided at the memorial service for her brother held at Stanford University. “…. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.”

She describes him “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.”

It’s hard to reconcile Simpson’s loving doting brother with the mercurial “monster” captured in so many other postmortems: the CEO who fired one employee for taking the wrong elevator, and who mocked a mediocre job applicant with the words “gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble.”

But Simpson drops her own clues about his superciliousness when she reveals that Jobs “went through 67 nurses before finding kindred spirits” who took care of him in sickness.

Jobs died Oct. 5 after a long illness from pancreatic cancer. Since then the media has worked overtime describing the Apple founder as an iconic evil genius who changed the technology through which we communicate, play, work and study. But someone who also lashed out at close associates, who eliminated charitable donations as Apple’s CEO, and who was described as ” ‘mean,” “petulant,” “brittle,” “abrasive,” and “cantankerous” by his authorized biographer.

Simpson’s portrait of her beloved brother doesn’t completely counter the persuasive evidence that he was part bully. And she sounds downright daffy when she writes that “death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it.” She reveals his last words were “OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.” Up to the last minute, Jobs was ever the showman.

But by adding her voice to the cacophony of competing soundbites about Jobs, Simpson does achieve one thing: she makes him sound almost human.