It Was Sad When The Great Ship Went Down

I guess it started with the children's folk song, "Titanic"—which I'd learned at camp and sang every now and then when Sam outlasted the usual bedtime song repertoire. The jaunty beat and schadenfreude lyrics belie the tragedy: "Watersnakes and turtles, little ladies lost their girdles, it was sad when the great ship went down!" Sam loves the chanting conclusion: "Kerplunk. It sunk. What a lousy piece of junk. The end. Amen. Splash! Gurgle, gurgle, gurgle..." It's rather cruel, when you think about it. So, in a way, I blame myself for Sam's current fascination with all things Titanic.

He first brought it up himself at Hog's Back this spring. Something about the rushing water must have brought the bottom of the sea to mind. As it happens, I caught it on video.

The ship with the dent in it. Yes, well, there's more to the story than that. And, for some reason, I told him so. Over the weeks he asked and re-asked for the details, committing them to fastidious memory. If I confirmed that, yes, it sure was a bad idea not to have enough lifeboats for all 2000 people on board," he'd correct me: "There were 2200 passengers and crew." The thing is, he seemed a little too cavalier for my liking, a little too eager to reproduce the iceberg strike in drawing after drawing. He and two of his classmates banded together into a little Titanic Fan Club, each critiquing the other's art projects. "You can't see very many decks on this part of your ship because they're already under water. Cool." On page one of a scribbler entitled "Things I Like" Sam drew the sinking ship and captioned it, "I lc too play Titanc."

It all bothered me a little. Hypocritical, I know, since I'm the one who happily crooned to a three year old, "Uncles and aunts, little children lost their pants, it was sad when the great ship went down!" before wishing him sweet dreams and leaving him alone with his huge imagination. Even still, it seemed important that he realize he was celebrating a catastrophe. So I bought a children's book called All Stations, Distress! The Night the Titanic Sunk. Despite its cartoon illustrations, it was a rather staid account of the disaster. But the sinking just didn't sink in. So I bought the movie, too. We couldn't let him see all of it, of course. There's an almost-risqué love scene and a remorseful suicide, for starters; and the fear and panic levels ramp up a little too high for a 6-year-old. But we watched most of it in hopes that he'd see the story from a new angle. We wanted him to get a sense of how it must have been to go into that icy water. It wasn't "cool," it was impossily cold. When Millvina Dean, the last Titanic survivor, died on May 31, I called Sam to the computer and showed him. Look, a real person.

This did seem to sober him for a while. But the appalling scenes in the movie that truly touched his heart were the ones behind this verse: "They were off the coast of England when they heard a mighty roar, and the rich refused to associate with the poor - So they put them down below, and they were the first to go - It was sad when the great ship went down!" The idea of first class passengers getting first crack at the lifeboats horrified Sam. The injustice of class discrimination was something he could get his mind around. He brings up those scenes at random moments—the locking of the lower decks, the men who broke out and stormed the lifeboats, the families who gave up and tucked back into bed, even as the water was washing up the hallways. Not fair, he'd say.

It occured to me then that he never asked about drowning or hypothermia. Psychologists generally agree that children learn to grasp the finality of death at some point between age six and nine...so it's quite possible that he simply can't fathom that part of the tale. In fact, when I hear him playing in his room, he's acting out the rescues, not the failures. And there are never any people bobbing in the icy water in his drawings. In his homemade Titanic book, the pages skip from the sinking to the lifeboats to the return home. I expected too much of a boy who can say the words of death and destruction but can't know their import. For Sam, the Titanic is an exciting story of survival— a heroic shipwreck tale, in which hundreds of people escape with their lives and are left singing "It was sad, so sad (too bad!), it was sad when the great ship went down to the bottom of the sea-ee-ee-ee ... It was sad when the great ship went down."