After "The book of life," my post of yesterday, I received a long and touching message from Ramana Rao. Ramana and my husband, Jeff Stamps, worked closely on developing OrgScope, software that visualizes and analyzes organizations in unique ways. I'm not going to talk about the software here other than to say that Ramana is the developer of StarTree, the hyperbolic viewer, the underlying software that made it possible for Jeff to envision and design OrgScope (working with our friends at Prodex). But all of that is really a (very) different post.
As has been the case with many millions of us, the death of Steve Jobs unsettled Ramana and his colleagues known as the Enterprise Irregulars. Scrolling down the list at that link, I recognize a few names and faces; indeed Ramana has introduced us to a few of this "diverse group of practitioners, consultants, investors, journalists, analysts and full time bloggers who share a common passion - enterprise technology and its application to business in the 21st century."
So...with Ramana's permision, I'm posting his email. So thoughtful, so touching, just the kind of email one in my situation wants to receive. Thank you, Ramana.
Hi Jessica,
I've been thinking of you many times since that wonderful visit in July. I've had the program from Jeff's memorial sitting next to my keyboard on my home computer and I smile every time I look at him smiling on the mountain top (can you send me that picture in digital form?). I noticed you had come through for the Saybrook event and was sorry that I only noticed after it was over. I would have come and perhaps you can send me what you shared.
I started to write this message last night as I considered how the outpouring on Jobs may be perturbing your own emotional streams. And this morning, I see your book of life post and from the face of it would trust that you are finding peace in your meditations. Are you?
I wanted to share the below I wrote this morning because Jeff and others are in my thoughts right now too. It was written in the context of an email group that I'm in, a very trusted set of people who are professionals in the Enterprise IT space. There was discussion there of whether there was undue deification or such going on, and I think there is some such but par for media & populist events in any case.
There are thoughts I have about Jeff. He was indeed special in an essential way to me. Yes certainly enthusiasm and intensity and intelligence, but combined in a way that seemed to impel him to carve
out the path of what he saw and of what he knew that it could mean. I find that inspiring. He still lives for me.
Ramana
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The day of Jobs' death, before the news had hit, I was walking by the Embarcadero Center 2, where Peter Rip, my VC, had worked. I was thinking how much I still missed him, almost a year since he died,
particularly these last months as I am about and working ideas for next. The question "what would Peter do?" was in mind so often, I had the thought of getting a wristband. Peter, for me, was such the perfect blend of intelligent skepticism and concise and gentle guidance: rather than sapping energy he shined or sometimes just simply smiled on a path forward.
A few hours after the news, as I was driving to pick up my daughter, I was amazed by how sad I felt, much more than I would have thought, as many others have commented since. So much has been written on his achievements since his resignation as CEO, that I was jesting that Jobs was such a genius in image-making that he had managed to go to his own memorial. But that was not exactly correct in several ways. Certainly we'd seen the public commemorating of the achievements and knew how truly inspiring he was to so many, but there was still a limiting of the vocal range of emotion and of the whole story as would have to wait for death and time.
As I headed up the steep slope of Pine St, I was considering how we could be flattened and joined by the death of one man. Really it's pretty hard to be novel here. I'm thinking the hard-not-to-think-of Donne's no man is an island and strangely enough, Lost. In current terms, it's the small world created by super-connectors not just on the network of people but on the network of ideas and passions. Who else (not what else) would have been as widely unifying at the moment? Was there anybody since Kennedy (I didn't experience that)? It's the powerful intersection of major figures and primal ideas.
Yet we all have people whose deaths are important to us at various levels of eminence and distance. The image that came to me was of the pantheon of deities in Hinduism with temples on every hill in India and shrines under banyan tree at village center, and from there a garland of flowers hanging around the photographs of the celebrated family member and the daily puja. A ringing of bells, burning of incense, an offering of fruit and sweets to the chosen deity and the deceased elder. I was always an outsider as I watched but I also felt a deep sense of respect for the ritual, that it wasn't simplistic or pointless.
It is not about Idol worshiping nor about idolizing the deceased, because the theism of Hinduism is certainly more complex and people in a family and a village know the full story of their elders. It is an
essential trait of humanity to be able to worship ideas. And it is about our need to be connected to the chain of being through our feelings and the universe that engenders such. Awe, beauty, compassion, love, grace, kindness.
Among the reasons why I could not or still can not imagine joining any of the major religion is not that they are all wrong, but rather that several seem right when you drop some details.
In the last couple of years, I've been moved by a string of deaths of people close or significant to me. My wife's cousin Steve the day after Steve, her father a few months ago, my wife's grandparents (who I knew very well), Peter, Jeff Stamps, Kris Olson, Rajeev Motwani, an aunt in India, an uncle that was especially adoring when we were small children---all of these I think very likely have fewer transgressions than those reported on Jobs.
In such passings, there is a forgiving, not so much of sins, but of details. Not so much to sanction or even forget as if to allow the deceased to ascend, but rather to heighten what we would keep of them
with us.
It is a deification, a lifting of some essence, a forever-ness from the passing.
