Glory Be Steve

Here we go. Our ICS – Idolatry Creation System – kicked into high gear this week causing the actual contributions for which Steve Jobs should be rightly remembered and respected to be lost in the carnival atmosphere of famous last words. It is bad enough we put him on a pedestal that rose a little too high in my opinion; now, his own sister has helped turn him into an oracle (how ironic) who has seen the gates (Ha! also ironic) of heaven.

His last words were reported to be, "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow." (all CAPS removed.) Three guesses what the world has already taken that to mean.

For those of us who have watched someone die, particularly of cancer, it is rarely the heroic, poetic battle ascribed by Jobs' sister. She is a writer, after all, with a flair for the dramatic. She described his breathing as "an arduous journey, some steep path, altitude." (Why is heaven always given an upward trajectory when extra dimensions might be anywhere?) She also said his final moments were spent staring lovingly at his family then staring past them and uttering his already famous words.

I know that stare. It is empty. I have stared back at it and wondered what my mother might see. But there was nothing in those eyes and by the time she was at that point, we knew there were no more words to come. My mother's last words came hours before, when it dawned on her after months of denial that she was about to die. "I guess that's it then," was the last she said to me.

I don't doubt Jobs' sister experienced the event just as she described it. But Steve Jobs' accomplishments and the examples he set here on earth while alive are enough for all of us to be inspired. Now, spiritualists the world over are already making it into something else.

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