POSTSCRIPT

On October 5, 2011, as I was driving down 280 north to Palo Alto, Lisa called to tell me that her dad had just died. Few words passed between us. There was a lot of space. I was glad her boyfriend was there with her since I couldn’t be. I turned into town to meet a friend in Menlo Park. The sky overhead was covered with the darkest charcoal-gray clouds imaginable. Yet there arched between Menlo Park and Palo Alto was a breathtakingly brilliant double rainbow. It floated like a prayer flag as if in recognition and honor of Steve’s death.

In Mona’s book Anywhere But Here she writes something to the effect that, Everyone we know before the age of twenty-five, we know for life. Steve was the first of my peers to die. He was my only child’s father, and someone, that despite it all, I truly loved. I was deeply shaken.

Lisa was with Steve the moment he died, and later that week she narrated his last moments to me. I replayed her words in my mind many times over the next months, working in finer and finer detail to take Steve’s death into my heart, to fully embrace and acknowledge that he was gone. But it was like that idea of infinity that my father had shown me at the kitchen table when I was young: with every increment of allowance of Steve’s death into my heart, I could only get halfway closer to what it meant to me.

I had been invited to Steve’s memorial service at Stanford because I had requested to be included. But then I was uninvited because I had given Rolling Stone permission to print a piece about Steve and our early years together. So it was only as a result of Lisa’s narration that I could see my way into my own experience of his death. I sat alone in Los Altos Hills overlooking Duveneck Ranch during the funeral and the memorial trying to fathom it all.

A few months later, I became aware that things had been written and said about me and my life with Steve that never had been checked with me. Things that were inaccurate and shameful. I felt like I had been skinned alive from the inside out. Was this Steve’s reach beyond the grave? Oh clever boy! One evening I was in so much pain that I called a friend to meet me for dinner because I could not bear it alone. That night, I drank a glass of red wine and ate red meat to numb myself. My friend studied me and then said, “I don’t think your pain is due to the libel. I think it is because of Steve’s death.” This was more than three months after he’d died. I had by this time recognized an enormous relief in myself that he was gone. Her words seemed kind but ridiculous.

The next evening, I walked around straightening my home because I could manage little else. Puttering. I was being made to look like a crazy person once again because it was easier for people to do this than to face Steve’s failure to do the right thing. I felt angry and distraught, but quiet. I looked at the facts: it was going to take me at least another year to finish writing my own story, and I couldn’t keep drinking red wine and eating meat to get through the days. And I couldn’t write in this much pain, either. In a calm and calculated way my thoughts turned toward suicide. I hated this world.

Yet my mind has a habit of flipping things around to find different ways to see. I’m a problem solver. And so, without intending to, my friend’s comment from the previous night came back to me. I asked myself if it could be Steve’s death and not the libelous humiliation that was causing the pain. It was just an idea. I didn’t expect much but once I’d posed the question, I was, to my great surprise, suddenly transported out of the acidlike pain and able to recognize my own true grief. It was about Steve’s death and I was grieving. This was the truth. Eventually I understood that the impossible level of pain was a confusion of the two conditions, but that Steve’s death was by far the stronger reality. Sorrow washed through me in waves that centered and grounded me. The truth I could live with.

When I went to bed that night I held close to my grief. I had to sleep but at the same time stay focused or I would go crazy trying to work out how I was going to deal with the libel. From within a deep emotional focus, I drifted in and out of a meditative state for about three hours. In it Steve came forward and showed me the truth of the love between us. He sort of merged into me, not as if we were one person but as if we were an intricate and complex kaleidoscope of interlocking yin and yang, fitting parts. He directed my awareness to a ball of light. It was like a brilliant sun the size of a small beach ball, hot white in the center that bled like liquid out to a rosy-, saffron-, and salmon-colored edge. In the dream we stood together at Duveneck Ranch under some trees watching the ball of light moving back and forth up a hillside like a printer stylus. It went back and forth, back and forth with a fifty-foot-wide swath as it climbed. Steve pointed out, to make sure that I saw that no matter where the ball of light was, no object cast a shadow. There wasn’t a tree or a rock or even a single blade of grass that wasn’t illuminated on all sides all at once, after the little sun had passed over. I studied in awe—delighted. Steve was sort of sobbing and simultaneously as sweet and happy as I had ever known him. We shared all states at once: peace and sorrow, joy, and love in the ache of truth and loss. And I kept refocusing as I rested through the hours so I could stay connected to him. Finally, after I could not focus anymore and started to fall off to sleep, I saw the ball of light move all the way up to the top of the mountain, become a setting sun, and then slip over the horizon as I finally dropped off into sleep.

Steve was right when he said he would lose his humanity in the business world. And yet the one and only true reality that we can be sure of is that despite all appearance to the contrary, everything is love. I track back to the glowing admiration I felt toward Steve at the very beginning, which is, among many things, that he had the strength to walk with who he was and would become. And though he came to lose sight of what was human and ethical all too often (and more and more as time passed), that he at one time knew the difference between who he was and the role he would play deepens my appreciation and love for him and all he carried.