Chapter Fifty-Nine
DEATH CAME TO ME QUICKLY. AS THE TITANIC’S ENORMOUS stern lifted out of the sea, the pages of my story hurtled toward its end.
My hands could no longer hold on to the deck railing.
As my fingers released, I was thrown toward the ship’s midline just as the boat cleaved in half.
My body was pulled into the vortex of the frigid water, spinning and twisting me with such violence, I remember nothing else before it all went blank.
What came next, I can only explain as transcendent. I was suddenly above my body, seeing it settle into the dark silt of the Atlantic’s floor. Debris and corpses continued to sink down around my lifeless body.
I can tell you that at the moment I became one of the hundreds lost at sea that night, a peace came over me.
I did not observe the remains of my father as my soul rose out from the ocean depths and into the starlit sky.
The dead do not concern themselves with the other dead.
It is the living—specifically those we loved—that we wish to soothe.
I saw my mother huddled in the lifeboat with many of the same women who had been at her party only hours before. Each of their pale faces was etched in shock and terror as the ship was engulfed before their very eyes.
The wails emerging from those flailing in the ocean were later recalled by a survivor as sounding like locusts on a midsummer’s night. Their torturous cries propelled those aboard Mother’s lifeboat to seek out if any of those still alive could be saved.
I knew my mother was desperate to believe my father and I had somehow survived initially, that we might be one of the lucky ones her lifeboat could still pull from the sea.
But in the end, their boat only managed to save eight crew members from the frigid waters.
As the pleas from the others eventually dimmed, they were replaced by a bone-chilling silence.
Ada and Lolly’s collapsible boat was far more vulnerable than the wooden crafts, as its sides were made of canvas.
The waves slapped at it mercilessly, causing it to nearly capsize.
At one point, Lolly’s toddler slipped out of her lap and almost fell overboard.
It was only when another lifeboat came to its assistance and tethered it to their sturdier one that the collapsible had a fighting chance against the elements.
Five hours later, Mother, Ada, and all the others on the lifeboats would be rescued by the RMS Carpathia.
Once on board the new vessel, Mother would be taken to the captain’s private cabin along with her friend Marian Thayer. There a fire stoked to warm them while a tray of food lay untouched.
Ada slept with Lolly and her children in one of the many first- and second-class berths volunteered by the Carpathia passengers, who had generously moved to third-class ones.
The two women I loved most in the world, who had always delighted in conversation, felt every word escape them now. They were silent, grieving, and terrified, and I was now incapable of pacifying their pain.