Steve Jobs' sister hailed him as a loving, tender soul in her touching eulogy for the Apple co-founder, which was published in The New York Times on Sunday.
Jobs, revealed novelist Mona Simpson, was "like a girl in the amount of time he spent talking about love."
Love, for the legendary innovator and inventor, was "his supreme virtue, his god of gods," said Simpson, who delivered the address at an October 16 memorial service, after Jobs lost his years-long battle with pancreatic cancer at the age of 56 earlier this month.
Simpson recalled first meeting Jobs when they were in their 20s, after she learned of having a long-lost brother, who was already a hugely successful computing innovator.
And she remembered what Jobs told her on the day he first met his wife, Laurene.
"There's this beautiful woman and she's really smart and she has this dog and I'm going to marry her," Jobs gushed.
The couple, who shared 20 years of marriage, went onto to raise three children. The trio were in the hospital room hours before his death, when Jobs, weakened by his fight to stay alive, spent time looking at them -- the final words of his life, revealed Simpson, were "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow."
In a recently published autobiography, Jobs apparently at first ignored protests of family, friends and his physicians for nine months in a bid to fight his cancer with a vegan diet, acupuncture and herbal remedies.
When he eventually underwent surgery in 2004 but the cancer had spread by that time to tissues around the pancreas.
"I really didn't want them to open up my body, so I tried to see if a few other things would work," Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson.
At the memorial this month, celebrities and Silicon Valley nobility paid tribute to the revered Apple co-founder at a private memorial service under tight security at Stanford University.
(c) 2011 AFP
