I Swear You Will Be Fine

Again, I am doing things I would never usually be doing. Perhaps I never wanted to be away from you for too long before. Now, there is no reason to rush home or even be home.

So I went with some dear friends to the Titanic Voyage- an immersive experience into the majesty and tragedy of the Titanic. I wanted to tell you about it when I came home. But you were not at home. So I’m telling you now.

I don’t recall any conversations we had together about the Titanic. The famous James Cameron movie was slightly before your time. And most of what I know came from that movie.

Much of the first part of the exhibition was on the construction of the Titanic. The costs, time and effort into creating a majestic beauty of its time.

But as we know, the final tragedy of the Titanic was a series of unfortunate events, which somehow lined up to the ending it didn’t deserve. “Unsinkable” was what most thought it to be. And then the many things we know about- reducing the number of lifeboats to create more open deck space, the speed of the ship in a known ice-field, the poor quality of the rivets in the hull, and the communication failures with other ships in the region. One of these unfortunate events I didn’t know about was the lack of the binoculars on the lookout. There was a reassignment of the Second Officer David Blair at the last minute, who took the key to the locker containing the binoculars when he left the ship. A series of unfortunate events.

As I was walking around the voyage, I, as usual, thought of you. 

Was your life like the Titanic? A beautiful boy, with everything going for you. Highly intelligent, goodlooking, talented, kind, sweet, with (almost) everything around you good too. The BPD was the iceberg lurking around. It had broken off a glacier in southwest of Greenland in 1911 and was drifting down south. The impact of the iceberg hitting the Titanic was perhaps the trauma you were exposed to, changing your life forever. That was likely the trigger for the BPD that became such a big part of the second half of your life.

After impact, the Titanic took 2 hours and 40 minutes to sink. You took 9 ½ years. And of course, the series of unfortunate events were those that led to your final departure on NYE.

The aftermath of the Titanic were the questions of how this came to be. We are doing the same. And more importantly, the grief of the survivors and surviving family.

At the start of the voyage, each of us was given a card- sort of like a ticket, with the name of a passenger on the Titanic. Mine was Annie Caton, a 33 year masseuse in the Turkish Baths of the Titanic. At the end of the voyage, we were to look at various lists of passengers to see if our passenger had survived. Annie Caton had survived. I had already guessed that as the survivors were known to be mainly women and children. She had managed to get onto lifeboat 11 together with other female crew. All of the passengers “belonging” to my other friends had not survived.

There is not an hour that passes that I don’t wish you were still alive. But I quickly catch myself telling myself I am being selfish. To have you alive would still mean you were constantly being tormented.

And this is where you are different from the Titanic. The Titanic lies in the darkness of the North Atlantic Ocean, at a depth of 3800 metres. You are in the spirited wind, careless and free now, occasionally tickling us with the most amazing of signs. I can hear you saying, “seriously Mum, you’re comparing me to the Titanic?”. Yes Josh, you are even greater than the Titanic, and especially now.

Love you darling,

Mum