STEVE DIED ON Tuesday, October 5, 2011. There were three services after his death. He was buried on October 8, with some three dozen people attending, including four Apple employees—Tim Cook, Katie Cotton, Eddy Cue, and Jony Ive—along with board members Bill Campbell and Al Gore, Bob Iger, John Doerr, Ed Catmull, Mike Slade, Lee Clow, the four children and Laurene and some members of her extended family, his sisters Patty and Mona Simpson. They gathered at Alta Mesa Memorial Park in Palo Alto, and walked on tatami mats to, and then around, Steve’s coffin. Several of the mourners spoke, and some read poetry. After the ceremony the group repaired to John Doerr’s house to reminisce.
On October 17, several hundred people attended a memorial service at the Memorial Church on Stanford University’s campus. The iPhone 4S had been introduced two days earlier, in the company’s first public event after Steve’s death, with presale orders that exceeded those of any previous model. The memorial service was an invitation-only event, and the guests ranged from his closest friends and family to the Clintons, Bono, Rahm Emanuel, Stephen Fry, Larry Page, Rupert Murdoch, and John Warnock, the Adobe cofounder. Bono and the Edge from U2 performed Steve’s favorite Dylan song, “Every Grain of Sand”; Joan Baez sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”; and Mona Simpson read a moving tribute about Steve on his deathbed. Larry Ellison and Jony Ive also made remarks. Steve’s daughter Erin lit the candles at the beginning of the service, while the other children all spoke: Reed read his own thoughts, Lisa read a poem, and Eve read the text of “Think Different.” It was, despite the number of people there, a deeply intimate and emotional event, which opened with Yo-Yo Ma playing the prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. Laurene’s own remarks about Steve were especially poignant:
Steve and I met here, at Stanford, the second week I lived in California. He came here to give a talk, and afterwards we found each other in the parking lot. We talked until four in the morning. He proposed with a fistful of freshly picked wildflowers on a rainy New Year’s Day. I said yes. Of course I said yes. We built our lives together.
He shaped how I came to view the world. We were both strong-minded, but he had a fully formed aesthetic and I did not. It is hard enough to see what is already there, to remove the many impediments to a clear view of reality, but Steve’s gift was even greater: he saw clearly what was not there, what could be there, what had to be there. His mind was never a captive of reality. Quite the contrary. He imagined what reality lacked, and he set out to remedy it. His ideas were not arguments but intuitions, born of a true inner freedom. For this reason, he possessed an uncannily large sense of possibility—an epic sense of possibility.
Steve’s love of beauty—and his impatience with ugliness—pervaded our lives. Early on in our marriage we had long dinners with Mona and Richie. I remember a particularly wide-ranging discussion that lasted late into the night. As we were driving home, Steve launched into a devastating critique of the restaurant’s sconces. Mona agreed with his assessment. Richie and I looked at each other, whispering, “Is a sconce a light fixture?” No object was too small or insignificant to be exempt from Steve’s examination of the meaning, and the quality, of its form. He looked at things, and then he created things, from the standpoint of perfection.
That could be an unforgiving standpoint, but over time I came to see its reasons, to understand Steve’s unbelievable rigor, which he imposed first and most strenuously on himself.
He felt deeply that California was the only place he could live. It’s the slanting evening light on the hills, the palette, the fundamental beauty. In his very soul, Steve was a Californian. He required the liberty it afforded, the clean slate. He worked under the influence, and the inspiration, of the sublimity of the place. He needed to be refreshed by the primal rhythms of the natural world—the land, the hills, the oaks, the orchards. California’s spirit of newness invigorated him, and ratified his own spirit. Its scale is contagious: such natural grandeur is the perfect setting for thinking big. And he did think big. He was the most unfettered thinker I have ever known. It was a deep pleasure, and a lot of fun, to think alongside him.
Like my children, I lost my father when I was young. It was not what I wanted for myself; it is not what I wanted for them. But the sun will set and the sun will rise, and it will shine upon us tomorrow in our grief and our gratitude, and we will continue to live with purpose, memory, passion, and love.
I left shortly after the ceremony closed. I was overcome with emotion, and with regret over my last conversation with Steve, which had occurred earlier that summer. He called to ask if I wanted to go for a walk with him and chat. In retrospect, I understand that it was an invitation to have one of those farewell talks that he had with quite a few people that summer. But I was in a dark mood then for a variety of reasons, and I didn’t realize how very, very sick he was. So instead of responding to his invitation I lit into him, telling him my grievances about our relationship, especially my anger at the fact that he had refused to work with me on Fortune stories after my battle with meningitis. He seemed stunned. After a few minutes, once I’d had my say, there was a silence on the line. And then he said he was really sorry. He sincerely meant it, I’m sure. He also told me that he would still like me to come see him, and maybe go for a walk around the neighborhood. I made a halfhearted attempt to schedule a visit with his assistant, but when there was a slight complication I quickly gave up, to my everlasting regret.
Had I gone to the reception after the memorial service in the Rodin Sculpture Garden of the Cantor Arts Center, a short stroll from the Stanford Chapel, I would have received a copy of Paramahansa Yogananda’s book The Autobiography of a Yogi, which was handed to each guest, in brown paper wrapping. I also would have walked into a who’s who of Silicon Valley, a gathering of the men, and a smattering of women, who had started the PC and Internet revolutions. John Doerr, Eric Schmidt, and Michael Dell were there, and the younger generation was represented by Sergey Brin and Jerry Yang and Marc Andreessen. But the core members from Apple’s birth were there, too; Woz, Regis McKenna, Bud Tribble, Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, and others. Lee Clow and James Vincent were there, as were NeXT veterans such as Susan Barnes and Mike Slade. The latter came with Bill Gates in tow.
“When Bill had gone to visit Steve at his house in May,” says Slade, “he got to know Steve’s youngest daughter, Evie, because both she and Bill’s daughter, Jennifer, do horse showing. After we got to this reception I kind of ditched Bill because I knew more people there than he does. I kind of felt bad, but I was like, oh, whatever, he’s a big boy. Half an hour goes by and I’ve lost track of him. So I went to find him. In the middle of the sculpture garden they had set up these really long couches in a rectangle where the family was. Laurene was there, and the kids were there. And that’s where Bill was, over on a couch, talking to Evie about horses. He just sat there and had been talking to her for a half an hour. He didn’t talk to anybody else.”
THE LAST MEMORIAL service occurred at the Apple campus in Cupertino, on October 20. Nearly ten thousand people gathered on the lawn within the ellipse formed by the campus’s main buildings. Every Apple retail outlet around the globe had been closed for the occasion, with the store employees gathered to watch video of the event streamed live to them over Apple’s virtual network. Tim Cook was the first speaker. Coldplay and Norah Jones, whose music had been featured in Apple television advertisements, played short sets for the crowd. But two speakers provided the highlights: Jony Ive and Bill Campbell, the Apple board member who had been a close adviser of Steve for many, many years.