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NEW YORK, Oct. 31 (UPI) -- Apple co-founder Steve Jobs' last words were "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow," his sister says. In her eulogy for her brother she delivered at an Oct. 16 memorial service at Stanford University and printed as an opinion piece in Sunday's New York Times, Mona Simpson explained what she knew about Jobs.
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"Steve worked at what he loved. He worked really hard. Every day," said Simpson, a novelist and a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. "He was the opposite of absent-minded.
"He was never embarrassed about working hard, even if the results were failures.
"Novelty was not Steve's highest value. Beauty was. For an innovator, Steve was remarkably loyal. He didn't favor trends or gimmicks.
"His philosophy of aesthetics reminds me of a quote that went something like this: 'Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.
"Steve always aspired to make beautiful later.
Love was important to Jobs, she said.
"Steve was like a girl in the amount of time he spent talking about love. Love was his supreme virtue, his god of gods," Simpson said. "He tracked and worried about the romantic lives of the people working with him."
She also said Jobs was "willing to be misunderstood," was "humble," "cultivated whimsy" and "liked to keep learning."
She recounted how he battled his illnesses, pushing himself to walked further each day after his liver transplant.
Even in his hospital bed, he was an innovator, sketching devices for medical equipment, she said.
Later, when his cancer overtook him and he was slipping away, he still battled for each breath, she said.
"Death didn't happen to Steve," she said, "he achieved it."
But just before he did, there were those final words he spoke just hours earlier: "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow."
