99 years

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In about two hours from when I am writing this will mark the 99th anniversary of the Titanic hitting the infamous iceberg in the cold, flat, north Atlantic. About two-and-a-half hours after, that harrowing event would be over for 1533 or so souls who went into the icy water. The infants, the children, the women newly orphaned and widowed in front of their eyes on an unimaginatively massive scale.

Even the crew, many of whom were unattached by design could only watch as their surrogate family, indeed their entire surrogate earth slipped away, taking much of what they knew with it. I wonder if the loss of the fathers and husbands mothers and sisters was drowned by the profound nature and terrible scale of the thing, or if the grief each survivor felt for each lost loved one was what moved them to tears that night. Of course, It was too cold to cry. And while the dead and dying floated like posed zombies, the ordeal was just beginning for the ones that made it in to the boats.

The movies like to portray thundering sounds of screaming from people splashing about in the water that level and then slowly die off completely. Mostly, the people who went in just died silently and in a state of shock; the freezing water stealing their ability to express the pain and dread they felt. Some were no doubt resigned before they went in, some were surely fighting that dreadful eventuality; scarcely able to comprehend the fate that was so plain and yet so unbelievable all the same. Sure, there are stories of people who went into the water and somehow made it to a boat, but they are a precious few among the ones consigned to the sea.

The screaming was reserved for the people who made it into the boats. The ship, which was for a short while on a perilous angle nose down into the black ink sea snapped with a thunderous crack that would have been audible for miles; there being nothing to stop it from issuing forth in all directions.

That would have been the moment when there was no denying the fate of the formerly sleek black steamer, adorned with classic lines and bedecked with technology that was supposed to be sufficient to stop precisely this from happening.

And after it was gone, they were alone. Adrift in an ice field, surrounded by dead bodies floating eerily around them. They knew help was coming, but they didn't know when. Some may have wished they were bobbing in the ocean as dead as dead could be rather than stuck on the boat, with nowhere to go and nothing to do but try to wrap their minds around what just happened.

They turned to the southwest and rowed until the with the dawn breaking over their backs, they spotted Carpathia, a ship of considerably less grandeur than the likes of Titanic. As it drew over the horizon and came closer, it must have looked beautiful beyond measure.

99 years ago those who made it, a mere fraction of the whole, waited patiently while they were hoisted, one by one, in slings onto the deck of an already crowded ship and awaited nervously their arrival to dry land and a new life that was altogether uncertain.
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