Friday, unofficial photographs were circulating in Web world allegedly showing Steve Jobs of Apple fame walking out of a hospital, skeletal looking. For those of us who have seen people in the last weeks or days of their lives, it's no mistaking that the man in the photos is in his final days.

All weekend, I wondered what the impact might be if Jobs decided to really be open about this final "app" and release some photos, some thoughts on his dying. We are still a culture that sanitizes death. Unless you have had the honor of sitting with family members and friends in their final days, your idea of death might come only from movies or from glimpsing dead bodies in war zones, hundreds of zones away.

Seems my "ideath" hope for Jobs was not original to me. One of my favorite writers, Tom Junod, wrote on an Esquire blog a similar hope. He wrote: Steve Jobs, who has done more than anyone to make the idea of a "digital life" possible, might have one last lesson for us, by letting us in on his digital death.

(Archive AP photo of Steve Jobs in healthier days)

 

 

---

---