Apple co-founder and Silicon Valley legend Steve Jobs lived a life that read like an epic novel, so it should be no surprise that his very last words on this temporal plane would be just as dramatic.

And they were: “OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.”

That’s according to his sister, Mona Simpson, whose moving eulogy was published in the New York Times today. It’s well worth a read, given what a gifted writer Simpson is — she is a much-respected novelist — and the amazing subject.

Simpson opens the piece by writing about her desire for her estranged father to return to her life and become the be all and end all. Instead, it turned out to be Jobs.

“Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me,” she wrote. “For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.”

A fitting legacy, among many.

It’s a delightful piece, too, and here is my favorite part:

“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.”

It’s lovely that his sister would be the one to give everyone that one more thing.

Most of us don’t get to stay goodbye quite so eloquently, if at all, as Simpson surmised about the message of her brother’s life. So, saying hello to life still remains our best option.

The money was actually raised last fall in two rounds after the company completed the Y Combinator program, but for whatever reason it’s been kept under wraps. NetworkEffect took the opportunity to talk with co-founder Rudy Adler about his year-old start-up this week.

“The Internet was missing a past tense,” is Adler’s quip to explain the motivation for 1000Memories. The site offers a central place for mourners to contribute pictures, stories and the like, with the promise of becoming a permanent collaborative obituary and eulogy.

Sites like Facebook don’t have a great way of dealing with people who pass away, because they are designed for living participants, Adler said. Creating accounts for dead people can be awkward, but perhaps less so on a dedicated, nicely designed site.

Future premium products for 1000Memories may include custom domains, physical memory books, personalized designs and additional storage, Adler said. The company currently helps its users do things like rip and post DVDs, in part because they are often much older and less tech savvy than the average social media user.

1000Memories recently launched a groups feature that was used to memorialize those killed in the Egyptian protests. It went viral, with more than 400,000 page views, Adler said.

In addition to Greylock, participants in the $2.5 million Series A round included Caterina Fake, Ron Conway, Keith Rabois, Mike Maples, Paul Buchheit and Chris Sacca. It came through just a couple of months after 1000Memories had raised an angel round worth $500,000.

An excerpt from the eulogy that Luke Russert gave for his father–NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert, who died suddenly of a heart attack recently–at a memorial service in Washington, D.C., a week ago, it is astonishing to see such poise given his young age (22) and under such tragic circumstances.

While all the controversy online erupted around when and how the elder Russert’s death was reported and about the huge amount of coverage, I think you will agree that this is well worth taking time to watch.

Here’s the video, taken from MSNBC: