A story that began on a cold April night nearly a century ago has finally come to an end with the death of Millvina Dean, the last survivor of the RMS Titanic. Dean was only an infant when the great liner struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic and became the most famous shipwreck of all time. How very strange it must’ve been for her to live out her 97 years in the shadow of a momentous event that she had no memory of herself.

I’ve been interested in the Titanic for a very long time, since well before James Cameron’s blockbuster movie became a cultural phenomenon in 1997, and even before Dr. Robert Ballard found her mangled remains on the ocean floor in 1985. I can’t really explain the attraction, except to say that it’s the rare case of genuine history that reads like a densely detailed novel. There is a huge cast of flawed, noble, heroic, lovable, cowardly, and ultimately fascinating characters. There is hubris and tragedy. There are coincidences and outright mistakes that make you wince and whisper to an empty room, “If only…” And there is the ship herself, the technological summit of her age, a thing of beauty and grace that must’ve been simply breathtaking to behold.

Now with Millvina’s passing, I feel as if the novel is complete. And just like when you’ve been reading one of those fat, rich, satisfying books, I find myself saddened by coming at last to the final page.

Millvina Dean was an interesting woman, in spite of her protest that she was really quite ordinary; you can read about her life and her thoughts on Titanic here. My understanding is that she never saw any of the many movies about the disaster, because she didn’t want to think about how her father and the other casualties met their ends. But while she may have had no use for Hollywood, the movie industry was kind to her. In one of those heartwarming gestures that remind us celebrities are human beings after all, the stars and director of the biggest Titanic movie of them all — Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, and James Cameron — had only weeks ago contributed heavily to a charity fund established to help pay her nursing home bills. I remember spotting that item in one of The Girlfriend’s celebrity gossip magazines a while back; I planned to blog about it, but the moment got away from me.

One final thought: in yet another one of those amazingly literary touches that seem to infuse the story of the lost Titanic, the day Millvina died, May 31, just happened to also be the anniversary of the ship’s launching 98 years earlier. You rarely encounter a piece of symmetry so fitting.