Four years after his death, Stephen Hawking’s legacy is still alive, beyond his scientific work, in the three children he had with Jane Wilde, the woman who gave him “a reason to continue living” when he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
with only 21 years.
Fruit of a marriage that lasted more than 30 years, Robert, Lucy and Timothy, whom on more than one occasion he was afraid to see himself as a “more chapter of the story” of his father, had a very different relationship with him,
But all, in his own way, have ended up finding their place away from the shadow of their progenitor, whose death has just turned four years.
The first of the three was Robert.
Born in 1967, just two years after the wedding, Robert helped from very young age to take care of his father, whom at that time the disease was already being seriously affected.
“He has done things for him that no child should ever do,” Jane came to admit in her’s biography.
That caused both to develop a very special relationship, and, when his father died in Cambridge at 76, he published a very emotional text saying goodbye.
“My father said many times how proud was that we were on his children. At that time I did not know how to answer, I did not have things named in my honor as the Hawking radiation, but, over time, and after becoming a father,
I realized that there is an inherent pride in a father who loves his children and who love him. Dad, I am very proud of you as a father, “he wrote.
Even though at first proved with physics, he finally ended up deciding on a career as a systems engineer who has led him to work for Microsoft.
He currently lives in Seattle, along with him and the two children of him.
Lucy, the second, arrived in 1970, and, if Robert picked up the interest in his father’s science and technology, she was the one who inherited the informative facet.
She studied journalism, but even though she came to write for such important media as The Telegraph, The Times or The Guardian, she never settled stably.
Even so, his taste for writing led him to write with his father several books destined to bring science closer to the little ones, and, for example, the key to the universe became translated into 38 languages and sold in 43 countries in
everyone.
From his marriage in 1998 with an employee of the United Nations was born his only son, William, whom he was diagnosed with autism.
That led him to commit himself with the cause of her and she is currently Vice President of the National Star College, an institution dedicated to helping people with disabilities, and she is one of the trustees of the Autism Research Trust.
In 2004, however, she arrived the personal moment of her darker her, because, after her divorce, she had to enter a detoxification clinic in Arizona, United States, to rehabilitate herism.
The work of her with people with autism and the books she wrote next to her father were those who finished sealing her recovering.
Who was not so lucky to share quality time with Stephen was the smallest of the three, Timothy, who has never hidden that distance provoked by the disease and by the situation that the marriage of his parents lived.
At that time, in 1979, things in the hawking house did not go to everything well, and it has even been speculated with the possibility that Tim was son of Jonathan Hellyer, the parish musician with whom Jane finished marrying
, Something that she shakes sharply.
At that time the ELA had already begun to seriously affect the communication skills of the scientist, which, in the words of his youngest son, made him barely have any kind of verbal relationship during his first years of life.
“At that moment my father could talk to his own voice, yes, but the disease caused him to be barely understood, until I did not really talk about five years,” he recognized later.
Of course, it seems that what Tim inherited from his father was the sense of humor, because there have been many anecdotes of how they programmed curse on the computer that eventually became indispensable for Stephen Hawking to talk to the rest
of the world.
From there, the relationship of him, who works as an executive in Lego, with his father began to forge and shared hobbies such as chess or Formula 1.
