Steve

I never met Steve Jobs, so I can’t tell you exactly why I cried, actually sobbed, off and on for the five hours after I read, at 8:30 Wednesday night, that he had died. I’m not sure why it came as such a shock. I had seen him in the videos, skeletal and frail, and I knew it had to be significant that he had stepped down from his position at Apple, but somehow I must have thought that he could just will himself to stay alive. And maybe he did for a while.

The haters are creeping out, and the word tyrant has been thrown around. The petty, jealous little minds are jumping to point out that he wasn’t a developer or an engineer, as if those were the only people who could be relevant in technology. But Steve Jobs had a spark, an insight, a dream, and he didn’t have to have his hands in the code or on the circuit boards to understand how they needed to feel when they were used. He saw what computers could become way before anyone else put all the pieces together, before anyone dreamed that computers could be personal.

Maybe he pushed as hard as he did because his soul knew that he didn’t have long to get it all done. A friend of mine said that he’s not really gone, his spirit is still here, and I do believe that. But…. we are snowflakes. Even though we reincarnate, like water melting and refreezing to fall from the sky again, even so, each time we are slightly different. And that specific concentration of energy and intelligence that was Steve Jobs is gone, and will not, can not, be again. And for that I grieve. I weep. I mourn.

Like Lady Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales, Steve Jobs’ energy affected the energy of the whole planet, and even though he’s been absorbed back into the ether, that concentrated light is gone. Maybe that’s why I cried for both of them. But Steve is the one who has changed my life. I suspect he will continue to change it in death, maybe even more so, because of the last message he left. This “me” can’t be again. Don’t waste it.