The Jobs Left Behind For Us

It seems like everyone has some kind of reason for feeling a sense of sadness over the death of Steve Jobs this week. This includes me. If you're a writer, this means you have to write about it. So here is my bit of writing on it. It is part of the responsibility of being a writer, part of the things we carry.

Steve Jobs was 56 years old. He was rich and successful. He did not have great hair but he had a great smile and this counts for a lot more. He was 56 years old, and he died of cancer. It seems quite unnecessary to state these facts as every news source in the world has covered the story this week, and over 9 million people have clicked on the YouTube of the commencement speech he gave at Stanford six years ago when he thought he had beaten pancreatic cancer.

I wish 9 million more people would listen to the speech he gave then. It was great. I want my kids to listen to it. I want to go back to my office and retrieve the memo I dropped into recycling today, the one with the phone number of the mother of one of my students who was going to have a brain tumor removed and who was worried about how he was going to manage to graduate "on time" now that the neurosurgeons said he wouldn't be able to do anything academic for the rest of this term. I want that student to listen to it and his mother, too. I wish my friend who abandoned the work he loved twenty years ago because it required him to be on the road and he chose to be home with his children would listen to it. I hope you will listen to it, if you haven't yet. It's nice that you're reading my blog; it might change your life to listen to Steve Jobs.

On campus today, there was a new batch of chalkings. Chalkings is a new social media. Overnight, legions of students come out with buckets full of chalk probably salvaged from their parents's garages, leftovers from their recently abandoned careers as children, and get busy inscribing huge pastel-colored messages on the university's sidewalks. This week's messages were a little different than most, though; they did not advocate joining any social or religious organization nor even a fraternity. They did not recommend a vote for anyone on any ballot but the divine's.

Today's scrawlings said simply: "Stay hungry. Stay foolish." This is the concluding advice Jobs gave the Stanford graduates in his address. It came from the cover of the final edition of what Jobs described as the "Google of the sixties," the Foxfire compendiums.

I am not a Mac user. I don't own an iPhone or an iPad, and I just sent my iPod to my son because I wasn't using it enough to justify keeping it when he would use it daily. I am not interested in computers, and I think the world might not be noticeably worse off if we didn't have the ability to look up every fact in every language at any moment instead of turning to those in our community and coming up with our own answers. And yet I am mourning Steve Jobs. I am mourning Steve Jobs because he set a very great example of what one person can do if he follows his heart.

Steve Jobs dropped out of college. Never finished even a Bachelor's degree. He dropped out because it was draining his parents' life savings. His parents never went to college either. He was fired from Apple. He started his own company. He started several. He had some ideas he wanted to pursue. He ate at the Hare Krishna's weekly "Chant with us, eat with us" table. He slept on the floor. It reminds me a little of JK Rowling scribbling notes that would become the Harry Potter saga on napkins in two-bit restaurants. Oh. I've never read any of the Harry Potter novels, either, and I'm kind of guessing I might feel sad when Rowlings eventually dies, too.

So why feel so sad about the passing of one man from the planet? Lots of good people die every day. Some of these good people get even fewer years than Jobs did. But Jobs knew he was dying. He knew it for nearly ten years, and he just kept right on doing his same old wonderful work, following his vision. Talking about the importance of doing work that you love. Talking about living each day as if it's your last day.

My mom died this year. That's a loss that kicks your feet out from under you; in many ways I'm still staggering around like a drunk without direction, howling at the moon that dares to spill its unperturbable light upon the surface of the lake behind my house like nothing has changed. My mom, like Jobs, knew she was dying, knew she had a very finite amount of time left on the planet, in her case, three years from diagnosis to death. I was with her when she got the diagnosis, and I was with her when her breath finally stopped. But until I listened to Jobs' Stanford speech I couldn't quite forgive what I blurted out absolutely without premeditation when we heard her diagnosis: "It's going to be the greatest experience of your life, Mom!"

That was a very strange thing to hear coming out of my mouth that day, and my mom was as shocked as I was to hear them. I would, in the next three years as I watched her suffer and dwindle, often rue the way words sometimes pour from me. But Steve Jobs makes me feel just a little bit better. He inspires me. He makes me think about what it is I should be doing on this planet for my one brief life here. There are not many people left who inspire us. There are not many people left who have both power and simplicity, wisdom and intelligence, conviction and belief. David Brooks captured some of Jobs' unique contributions to us in his column in the Times today. When we voted for Obama, we thought he might be another one of these rare public figures who had all this. That illusion is gone. He may not be corrupt, but he's been beaten. He's become ordinary. Ironically, after I came to this thought on a walk today, I returned to my comnputer to find a link to an Onion article saying much the same thing, having their own way with words.

Good night, Mr Jobs. Thanks for everything, including the work you left behind for us. I'll be tackling that assignment for the rest of my one wild and precious life now.