Steve Jobs
Jobs' sister, the author Mona Simpson, reveals his last words Apple

Mona Simpson, the author and sister of the late Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs revealed the final worlds of her brother at a memorial service at Stanford University.

Printed in the New York Times, the eulogy to Jobs concluded with Simpson recalling Jobs' last words: "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow," before he passed away with his wife and children by his side on October 5.

During the eulogy, Simpson remembered her brother fondly, recalling some of his quirks: "For an innovator, Steve was remarkably loyal. If he loved a shirt, he'd order 10 or 100 of them. In the Palo Alto house, there are probably enough black cotton turtlenecks for everyone in this church."

Simpson also shared some observations on the Apple co-founder's love life: "Steve was like a girl in the amount of time he spent talking about love. Love was his supreme virtue, his god of gods. He tracked and worried about the romantic lives of the people working with him.

"Whenever he saw a man he thought a woman might find dashing, he called out, "Hey are you single? Do you wanna come to dinner with my sister?"

Jobs suffered from pancreatic cancer from 2004 and had a liver transplant in 2009; his sister recalls the determination he had to recover: "I remember my brother learning to walk again, with a chair. After his liver transplant, once a day he would get up on legs that seemed too thin to bear him, arms pitched to the chair back.

"He'd push that chair down the Memphis hospital corridor towards the nursing station and then he'd sit down on the chair, rest, turn around and walk back again. He counted his steps and, each day, pressed a little farther."

While Jobs was in hospital his creative mind was always on the lookout for design improvements. "He sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed," Simpson said. "He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment. He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit."

The moving eulogy concluded with Mona Simpson recalling the last few hours of Jobs' life: "He told me, when he was saying goodbye and telling me he was sorry, so sorry we wouldn't be able to be old together as we'd always planned, that he was going to a better place.

"Steve's final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times.

"Before embarking, he'd looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life's partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.

"Steve's final words were: 'Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow'."