When I heard that Steve Jobs had passed away, I was boarding a train from New York to Philadelphia to visit my son. A friend phoned and then text-messaged me the news before I could read it on Twitter. It felt, I said later, as if someone had torn the hair out of my head.

When I did tweet, the first semi-coherent thought I was able to write about Jobs was also about my son:

I’m on my way to PHL to see my son, who uses a device Steve Jobs invented to help him talk. He will never know. He will never know.

My son is on the autism spectrum and has a severe receptive and expressive language delay....