Here’s an interesting tidbit from the weekend’s headlines: the last American survivor of Titanic has died at the age of 99.
Lillian Gertrud Asplund was five when the great ship went down; she lost her father and three brothers in the disaster, while her mother and a fourth brother made it into the lifeboat with her. Curiously for a woman of her generation, she never married, and, unlike other survivors, she rarely spoke about what happened on that cold night in the Atlantic.
If it isn’t obvious, the story of Titanic is yet another of my esoteric interests. Like so many other things on which I expend my mental energy, my interest in this subject began with a movie. No, it wasn’t James Cameron’s sudsy magnum opus of forbidden young love on a doomed voyage (although I did like that film; sometimes think I’m the only human with male chromosomes who is willing to admit that). The movie that actually triggered my interest in Titanic was a 1958 docudrama called A Night to Remember, which I saw on TV as a kid. I don’t know if I understood at the time that what I was seeing was based on an actual event, but the story lodged firmly in my head, as did the film’s stark black-and-white imagery. I still tend to imagine the event in black-and-white, even after seeing several more modern films. I read books about Titanic throughout my youth, moving up from young reader-versions to young adult and finally to full-blown adult-sized tomes (Walter Lord’s book A Night to Remember — the basis for the first Titanic movie I saw — is still one of the best.) And I’m not too manly to admit that I actually misted up a bit when I first heard back in 1986 that the wreck had been found, because it had always seemed like such an impossible task, and because it was diasappointing to learn the ship had been ripped in half instead of sitting probably intact on the bottom as so many people had imagined over the years.
As to why this particular disaster story has such an effect on me, I can’t entirely say; you could ask the same question of our society in general. There have been lots of shipwrecks over the years, including many in which more lives were lost than in the case of Titanic. I suspect the emphasis on this particular wreck comes in large part from the Greek tragedy aspect of the story, the whole “unsinkable ship on its maiden voyage” thing, which is far more romantic in the telling than “this ordinary but aging ship with a hundred voyages under her belt aground on a reef” or some such. And it probably has something to do with the Titanic wreck occurring just as the mass media — as we now understand such a thing — was coming into existence. Unlike any previous shipwrecks, Titanic called for help on a wireless transmitter, the cutting-edge tech of the day, and nickelodeon audiences were able to see moving pictures of the survivors disembarking from the rescue ship only days after the actual event. Never before had the public been able to experience a newsmaking event so directly.
In any event, with Lillian’s passing, there are now only two survivors remaining, both of whom were infants at the time of the sinking according to an entry on Wikipedia. I find it strange to think that there are any actual survivors still alive, perhaps because the story has been fictionalized so many times that it really does feel like just a story. After these last two human connections to “the night” are gone, then that’s all it will be…
