The passing away of Steve Jobs saddened me with an intensity I didn’t expect. I walked around the apartment feeling like a distant but old friend had died.

As a kid, I was lucky enough to have a stepfather who bought Apple computers when they first came out. A laser printer, too! I can trace many of my first attempts at writing to a typewriter I was given at 13 – a machine that tried really hard to be a word processor. I could delete an entire line, if I wanted to, by pressing a single button and then watch the correcting ribbon dash back through the offending words and bang them back into the white paper.

When the Apple II came into our house, along with the laser printer, I could see my words in a whole new way: as if they were published, written by someone else, or written by me, as a published author. Inspired, I wrote more. So Steve Jobs was partly responsible for my life-long dreams of writing.

Gadgets have become an anchor for me when life gets low. I obsess over my computer, phone, whatever, instead of spiraling down into depression. Well, sometimes it works, and for that I’m grateful.

Only 56 years old.