
OH WOW
Worst news story ever.
A eulogy for Steve Jobs written and delivered by his sister was published over the weekend. It reveals many personal details of the techbiz titan's life, among them his last words as he lay dying with his family around him. According to Mona Simpson, Jobs' sister and a professor of English at the University of California, his …
"Not any kind of visions of the afterlife or ghosts or any of that mythical nonsense."
People seeing visions as they near death is pretty well documented and can't realistically be called nonsense. If you want to call them hallucinations I'll go with that, but to say people don't see things that look like God or angels or (more likely in Jobs' case) Nirvana is to ignore tons of documented research on the subject.
She was probably carrying a Samsung.
As famous last words go, not too memorable, and up against:-
God damn you --- George V - not a particularly good final few words - maybe he realised the brompton cocktail was to get him into the first editions...
but infinitely better than...
They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist.... which were the highly inaccurate last words of General John Sedgwick a commander in the US civil war.
Probably wasn't a telescopic sight, just a Kentucky long rifle...
Other (applicable) last quotes..
Leonardo da Vinci: "I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have"
Pancho Villa: "Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something…"
Ludwig von Beethoven: "Friends applaud, the comedy is over."
Personally I'm going to copy Rick Wakemans epitaph: …”There’s been a mistake . I haven’t finished yet”.
So right. My very ill mother was pumped full of morphine for the last few months of her life to control pain, and whilst it could be entertaining listening to her having babysat the neighbours kids the night before, the induced hallucination was not very pleasant to behold in someone who was so dearly loved.
A joke is okay, but there are some areas which should be treated as completely out of bounds.
Sorry about your mum, but you REALLY need to grow a thicker skin! Pretty much everything people say that isn't small talk is going to be capable of offending someone, somewhere. How often have you or someone you know said "oh, you nearly gave me a heart attack", when surprised... well curse you for treating heart attacks in such a light-hearted way! Chill some. Oh, and my Dad had Alzhemiers and I often hear the jokes about that and don't really mind; it's human nature and it's not meant personally, I know - so I do speak from some experience.
Some years ago, my Dad was suffering an aggressive form of prostate cancer and quite advanced Alzheimers (he always was an unlucky bugger). In his more lucid moments, he would often comment that he was glad he had Alzheimers, it made him forget he had cancer.
I can only hope I can face my end with such humour and equinamity as and when it comes.
GJC
Lets face it.. Infront of your family, children especially. Seeing dad screaming in pain wouldnt be a nice lasting memory.
So, if you do have the abilty/presence of mind to be able to give them a warming last memory, its not a bad one to go with.
He was often quoted as looking forward to his next journey, so it would fit the Man.
If it's true, and was planned, good for him.
I know two people who died as a result of their cancers, and witnessed their deaths... both were heavily sedated and quite unconscious for the last 24 hours or so. Neither were in a particularly coherent state for some time prior to that as a result of large doses of painkillers and sedatives.
I Am Not A Medic, but I doubt it was any different here. You too might go "Oh Wow" when dosed up with enough opiates to make the world go away.
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What I may have missed and what doesn't seem to be here is his sister's account of whether or not he was *smiling* or lamenting or was he bowling over in pain. Nevermind the drugs.
The problem with humans is we "cling" too much. If we're more rationally earlier in life trained to EXPECT death, how EVER it comes, part of the excessive preoccupation with transformation of some sort is nixed. Now, if one is violently removed from our realm, and it was an most unfair, vicious means, then of course, getting emotional, defiant, and and full of denial is much more to be expected. Revenge and all sorts of other things can result.
But, for those who live long, reasonably good, materialistic, violence-free lives, and who have very little to want for, those kinds of people ought to be more rooted, and many probably are. Many of them *likely* (if thoughtful) prepared their familes and loved ones to be strong and not deny the inevitable fact of death. It is truly one's right to die with dignity and without uncouth activity, but one cannot demand AND get the right to be corporeally persistent.
Given Jobs' past, I'm pretty sure he very well prepared his family. I suspect there are some uncouth, profiteering journalists and rags out there seeking to monetize every last bit of the man's life. If it was not the drugs, then it probably IS the case that he was energetic enough to vocalize what he felt he was experiencing as a transition. So long as we're not truly evil or murderous, it's possible we'll get to feel or think we're feeling a new level of existence, probably for a better path, not a regressive or "back to square one" or, "onward, straight to a hell box".
We're too caught up in "death" because we're not permitted in general to die then come back to talk about it. Those who do claim the event are commercialized to the hilt and yet the world is not globablly transformed.
"If we're more rationally earlier in life trained to EXPECT death, how EVER it comes, part of the excessive preoccupation with transformation of some sort is nixed."
Sorry to break it to you but that's utter bollocks.
I lost a child a few years ago (at a few months old), and my older children KNOW what death is because of that. Everything was explained to them at an appropriate level for their ages, and any questions over the years have been answered truthfully. At the time they weren't too bother, now they do worry more over death and dying than other children of comparable age (6-9). They worry more when people are ill that they will die.
I would never have withheld the information from them, but it does change their outlook on life......
I've lost dearest friends, casual friends, and relatives, and shipmates. Some from my age of about 10, some older. Biology class, war movies, news, and living in rough neighborhoods with very little isolation from danger has a way of altering perception, outlook, expectations... Nowadays, even if I have a spell of pain, I still *hope* that they went to a place better than here. It needn't be some human-named place called "Heaven" or "heaven", it just hopefully is not some dead-end, meaningless, pointless, void of a place.
So, in my case even before my teen years, I knew what death was likely to be like. I too worried at times. Had some anxiety over it. It came and went off an on over the years. Sometimes, now, I actually WELCOME it. Nothing will last forever, and the longer we are cushioned by denial or those who withold it form us
As for the adults, having knowing that he delayed treatment, and went to the hospital at least 3 times, they had to have known for years that he was on the losing end. He probably made his inner peace. Do you think Jobs withheld it from his family and banned them from watching the news? The adults surely must be capable of coping with this, shouldn't they? Obviously (and, did I need to say it?) the kids are a special case. I am preeeety sure that any close relatives of any family standing to get the kind of money Jobs is leaving behinds will have a few frames of mind:
1. I feel sorry for you that you have to go so soon, at this youngish age, in this manner
2. I hope like hell your affairs are all in order and that I get some of that pie
3. I hope I can live long enough to enjoy it -- whether or not a make a + difference in the world
4. I hope like hell you don't perceive of me from afar as undeserving of your gifts -- GODS, thank you, man.
ANd who knows what else.
As for kids, I know that not all kids will process the loss of a parent, but many kids can be reslient, especially if they have several years of preparation. I am not certain, but I doubt Jobs and his wife and relatives would deprive the kids (I don't know their ages) of the evolutionary stages of passing on if they are at least past 6 years old. It'd be kind of cruel to just spring it on them by way of a sudden disappearance from the daily hugs and wrestling or TV watching and so on.
Now, if someone left *me* that kind of money, even $500,000 after taxes, I could create jobs and income streams and maybe open an incubator or two.
PS, I wasn't trying to demean or degrade individuals stages of grief. It's just that we as a species vest a lot in clingyness as if there is no chance to "meet up" later.
"The Castle of Aaargh."
What is that?
He must have died while carving it.
-Come on!
-That's what it says.
Look, if he was dying,
he wouldn't bother to carve "Aaargh."
-He'd just say it.
-That's what's carved in the rock.
-Perhaps he was dictating it.
-Shut up!
-Does it say anything else?
-No!
But, for the complainers, i'm sure this was a Bootnotes story. No? Oh...
Whatever my opinions might be of Apple's products and/or their marketing strategy I have never experienced the impulse to wish Mr Jobs any personal harm. In the same light I regard his passing as an intensely private moment that I do not feel that I have the right to share. What was it that that Dylan Thomas wrote?
"Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
That moment should have remained something that he only shared with those closest to him - shame on those who have chosen to "Face-Book" it.
Seriously what a pile of steaming crap. I would hope you guys could shit better articles than this.
This is tech news why? The sadly misinformed will think this confirms their delusion in the sky fairy everyone else will realise that its the drugs.
And if I had the will to as I died it would not be wow or some other shit, it would be to say good bye to my family.
This was reported elsewhere of course, so someone thought it was fair game to put a comical perspective on it. Sorry, no matter your views on the reported last minutes of Job's life, as reported by distraught family members, this is not a subject for sarcastic humour so soon after the event. It is an epic fail in taste and decency by a web publication I respect enormously, despite its juvanile tendancies at times. I have little respect for Apple and a very negative opinion of their business ethos, but a man is no more than flesh and blood in the end, and despite any opinion of Jobs as a CEO, he was far from a really cruel, let alone evil figure. I'm not usually so serious on here, but this very poor taste has annoyed me.
Perhaps:
1) He was seeing that AT&T's network actually works in Heaven.
2) Or that the heavenly Apple Store always has your item in stock and there are always enough registers and counter help that there are never more than two people in line!
3) Or he was reacting to St. Peter telling him "We can let you in, but first you need to pay the backdated property tax rebates you received from Cupertino--here's the bill."
4) Or maybe fate had it that at that very moment he had an LSD flashback....
Ok, tacky, I know, but I am getting seriously tired of the number of stories eulogizing Steve....
...is, according to recent research, quite possibly an amazing DMT trip shortly beforehand. I won't thank nature for any aspect of death, but I will be thankful that it's a peaceful trip about rising into heaven and meeting angels instead of a deliriant horror trip about giant tarantulas eating our eyeballs.
(And if you thought it would have been more amusing if Jobs' last words had been "OH GOD THE SPIDERS ARE EATING ME", you are a bad person and should feel bad. Although there would undoubtedly be more comments in this thread.)
It is exactly the last part of a very first personal account of Steve Jobs from a family member. In fact, perhaps the last one you will read after the family notices how it was abused. Instead of reading that PR maniac's authorised bio, read the eulogy instead and head to folklore.org
I think there are some things that most of us understand are OK for a bit of black humour between friends, but are inappropriate for public humour. Perhaps I'm old fashioned, but I think most peoples last moments are more deserving of a little respect than the "6 year old commentard" treatment.
I have no use for i-anything, but really, some of the commentards on here should stop, step back, take a good hard look at themselves and ask themselves if they really, truly, want to be, and look like, that much of a cunt. That includes the inevitable deluge of people who think using the term "sky fairy" is still funny.
As to whether The Reg should have published it, it was released to the public so the family were obviously happy with it being published, it was a story covering the last moments of a hugely influential man in the techie field (albeit one that I dislike), and really? If you care THAT MUCH about the few brief moments you spent reading the piece before you went off on your spittle flecked little rants, apply for a refund. On your free online journal. Which no-one made you read.
I wonder why his sister published this in the first place. Probably the same anti-social genes which Steve was known to possess. (ok, maybe not genes, because Steve was adopted, but you get the point)
You can love or hate Steve Jobs (and there doesn't seem to be much gray between these two extremes in his case) but for heaven's sake the man is dead. Leave him alone. Let him rest in peace, at least for a while.
I feel a real sense of shame reading these comments.
Love or hate where's respect? If you can't respect him for what he achieved (more than anyone on this forum will I bet) then what about simple respect for the dead/dying?
These are the last words of a man with a family who survive him, they will hold deep emotional significance and probably leave the family searching for answers the rest of their lives.
-not an apple fan by any strech, dont own a single apple product. But the man changed all our lives in some way and achieved a greatness we can only envy.
Rest in peace.
He only did three things worth respecting. And there's a certain man who died a few days later who deserved far more recognition than Steve Jobs.
1. Jobs helped propogate the idea of the PC to the everyman (Alongside IBM and Bill Gates.)
2. Jobs got Pixar going.
3. Jobs pulled a few open source projects out of development limbo and is pretty much the only reason BSD hasn't completely lost its user base.
One big thing against Jobs: He was not a revolutionary, no matter how much people liked to paint him up as one. Apple is just as bad as Microsoft with the "not-invented-here" syndrome. They're just worse because of the cult worship Jobs gets.
Also, I should note, especially in the early days of Apple: Steve Jobs wasn't even creating or designing the stuff Apple was selling. It took him getting fired in 1986 and struggling to get NeXT a success to get him any sort of technical competence. It was Steve Wozniak we have to credit for Apple's prooducts up to the Macintosh. And frankly I never saw any sign that Jobs had even that much technical knowledge when he came back to Apple in 1997. He clearly wouldn't have had the know-how to even recognize the potential of Unix back in 1986. More than likely he rode on the back of competent engineers in NeXT. And it was actually, believe it or not, thanks to Microsoft he ever got back to Apple, likely bringing those same engineers with him.
Not that I am saying Apple riding on the power of Unix is bad. It's actually very good. My point is that I have my doubts Steve Jobs himself ever had the know-how to actually say what Unix was or what it represents. This can be evidenced by the fact that while Unix may have definitely improved Mac OS X, it still seems wasted on it since Apple is big on hiding any technical features from its users anyway, almost completely crippling the full potential a Unix system could have. This is partly why I dislike Ubuntu is well, so don't think I'm just picking on Apple here.
Good accomplishments, but compared to Dennis Ritchie he was a nobody in the tech sector:
1. Ritchie invented C, a language that shaped every language devised after its creation, and is one of the most powerful compiled languages in computing history. Even Apple's own Objective-C owes its existence to C.
2. Ritchie co-created Unix, an advancement without which computers would never be where they are today. Every operating system in the world owes its design and theory to this operating system. Even Windows. I might add also that OS X is Unix, and it was Unix that saved Apple, not Jobs.
3. Ritchie and company are responsible for a lot of research and development projects that gave Steve Jobs any sort of career. Without the work at Bell Labs, we wouldn't have microprocessors, the transistor, Unix, C, C++, or any other number of genuine innovations without which modern computing just wouldn't be possible. Not all of it can be credited to Ritchie, but a heck of a lot of software advancements can. Basically, to sum up, Ritchie is one of the people responsible for pulling the operating system and programming languages out of inefficient time share systems and into real-time multi-user systems as well as low-level compiled languages ideal for any task, but those especially fit for a need of power or close-to-the-metal programming that doesn't need architecture-dependent code (In the form of assembly.).
4. Ritchie really was a revolutionary. Whereas Steve Jobs was basically selling products people already had seen before but in shiny packages with less features, Ritchie and company were basically INVENTING the stuff Jobs would sell over a decade later. What makes him go from inventor to revolutionary is that he created stuff that actually did revolutionize the entire tech industry through the creation of Unix and C, as well as his other research projects. Steve Jobs can't lay claim to a single innovation on that scale, not even the PC, which was invented years before Apple was even founded.
Ritchie and Jobs were inventors. Software is the new language but presentation of the box it come in makes the sale. Steve made decisions based on his gut feeling for what the average consumer would buy. Operating systems, car engines, new ideas need people who sell a vision for daily use by the raw unwashed public (mankind) of the box.
As for his last day with his family; it's going too far you or I to speculate what the meaning by his Wow Oh! Each of us will take a last breath, last heart beat, last brain wave before turning white in death. We can believe in nothing or believe in a loving Jesus or a trip into hell on our last day and those before our last.
Jobs and Ritchie can be remember for good ideas or not.
What good ideas has your day produced for mankind?
than what has happened in the past with famous people? Eulogies are often published. In fact, one doesn't have to be famous; sometimes you'll read eulogies in the obituaries of your local newspaper, in church bulletins, in newsletters, hear them broadcast on the news, find them on YouTube.
It's also fairly common to report people's last words....if it weren't, how would commenters here have been able to quote the last words of OTHER famous people?
Sometimes, that's what families wish to do. The eulogy was heard by a lot of people at the funeral. Jobs sister seems to have wanted others to know a little of what her brother was like to her, what he meant to the family personally, not as a leader in an industry.
There has been a great deal written about Jobs as head of Apple. Maybe his sister simply wanted something on the record about another side, to add one voice saying: I loved my brother. I miss him. This is who he was to me, no matter what all the news stories have to say.
Grief is difficult, complicated. We have our memories, and we have our words. Jobs sister wanted to share hers...maybe because it helps her? Maybe because the more people who hear what she had to say, the easier it is for her to deal with the emptiness and loss? To feel her brother is not completely gone, or hope people will remember more of him than the businessman, the obsessive?
And what, in the end, is so wrong about wanting those we love, somehow, to live forever?
The dead can no longer be hurt by anything written here or anywhere. The living can. Funerals are for the living, a ritual most humans need and want. They serve a purpose.
There is no excuse for being accusatory and judgmental, when the only "sin" committed was one that happens every single day, in every country in the world: relatives and friends standing up at a funeral, a wake, a memorial service, and sharing their memories of the deceased.
There is comfort for many people in that sharing. There is comfort in knowing someone's last moments were free of fear or pain. That the person you love had the blessing of calm, happy release from incurable, unrelenting agony.
Mocking what a person says as they die is inhumane and childish, considering the dying person is no longer in control, neurons and synapses losing connection, the system failing. But for the family, it may have been a moment of relief, and one that will give them a small smile from time to time when they most need one.
Who knows what he saw and whether it was a hallucination or the afterlife. None of us really know what happens. I like to believe in reincarnation myself. Certainly what's beyond is a tighter kept secret than Apple's source code.
Kind of a tacky story though, more along the lines of a tabloid reporting on the ghost of Michael Landon or something.