Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

by Kara Swisher

He was only 34 years old. Dr. Louis Bush Swisher died from the complications of a brain aneurysm that burst without warning one sunny Sunday morning more than 20 years ago. My room was so dark that when I came out into the hall to help wake him for breakfast, the brightness of the day slapped me back to the shadowy doorway. I watched from there as my brother knocked purposefully on the door of my parents’ bedroom to get my father up. The door was locked, and Jeffrey turned the knob round and round and hit the door with his hip. He just didn’t give up, though no amount of shoving was going to open it, I remember thinking at the time. That was me, the practical one, with the unlikely childhood understanding that some things just aren’t ever going to move. We both thought my father had fallen into a deep sleep in there while writing a speech he was to give the next day. So, my older brother Jeff kept kicking the door and smacking it and making such a noise that my mother finally came up, knocked impatiently and said, “Bush, Bush, open up the door right now; you’re making Jeff very upset.” But he did not wake. After that, it was quick: The firemen coming to ax the door to splinters, the ambulance and stretcher with all sorts of things hanging off of it. And the extraordinary silence when it was over. I went back into my cocoon of a room, well before they carried my father out, and only imagine now the gurney with him on it, the white sheet, the hysterical cries of my mother fo...