Two Titanic Thoughts

​April 15th is the No GPS Anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic.  It's a pretty easy date for Americans to remember because April 15th is also the day U.S. income taxes are due.
 
My niece is a teacher who had always wanted to visit a Titanic museum, so for Spring Break we picked her up for a Titanic-themed vacation. It was filled with frisky penguins, a ghost ship captain, indoor snow tubing, a killer iceberg, swimming, and 2000 miles of driving.
 
There’s a number of Titanic exhibits I've seen, like in Liverpool and Vegas, but this one (Pigeon Forge, TN) was set up so you could more closely identify with the people on board.  For instance, you were given a biography card of someone on the Titanic, and you kind of followed that person around – where they slept, ate, and chilled out.  Super-engaging.

At the end there’s a huge biography board where you find out if your character survives (about 1/3 do), what they looked like, and what happened to them afterward.  
 
There’s probably 20-30 rooms with exhibits and actors, and interactive things like trying to walk on a 30-degree tilting deck.  Yet the two things I’ve thought about many times in the past week both happened in the very last room.  The one just before the gift shop.

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There’s a climatic scene in the World War II movie Saving Private Ryan when the only surviving person in the battle, Private Ryan (ill-timed **spoiler alert**) is told by his dying Captain “to make his life worth it.”  The movie then flashes to present day when he asks his wife to hopefully confirm to him that he lived a worthy life.
 
Did any of the survivors on Titanic's biography board do anything different after they were rescued to “make their life worth it?”  To be sure, some people had some pretty tragic years that followed (suicide, prison, bankruptcy, multiple divorces and addictions), and some charmed-life rich people seemed to continue to have charmed lives.  There was little indication of which people might have done something different to have make their life “worth it.”  Sometimes it might be only the person themself who knows it.
 
If we were dramatically given a lucky lifeboat seat -- like the some of the Titanic survivors -- I wonder whether we’d try to make life “worth it?”  Even if we didn’t know how, there’s a good chance that simply repeatedly asking ourselves that question might guide us in a good direction.

​The second Titanic thought was also brought to light in that same dark room.  While I was reading that bio board, a 90-year-old 6’4” ghost of the Titanic’s Captain Smith silently came into that somber room, walked over to a spot-lighted Captains chair, gathered the 20 of us together, and told two riveting eerie stories. Actually, he wasn't a ghost.  He’s Lowell Lytle, the person who has portrayed the Captain for 30 years around the world, as his 4th amazing career. 
 
The story he told the small collected group was what happened with the “Women and children first” directive that was given as they lowered the lifeboats.  Men would get their wives and children loaded in the lifeboats, and they would then all wave goodbye for the last time as the lifeboats were lowered into the ocean.  Three hours earlier they were having together and Dad was telling them to turn their iPhones off, three hours later they were gone.
 
We often think we’ll have plenty of time to thank people we’re grateful to, or to say “I love you” to people we love.   Lytle's point was that we don’t need to wait until the lifeboat’s being lowered away before we  say it. 
 
My family spent a 10-hour drive home listening to the amazing ups and downs in Lytle’s real person life (Diving Into the Deep at Encourage Books).  We’ve all had lucky breaks in life that merit us asking ourselves if we’ve tried to make our life “worth it.”  We’ve also have people we’re grateful for who we need to thank, and we have people we love who are worth telling daily that we love them.  
 
Two Titanic thoughts.  I'm happy we can think about them and act on them a long ways from the nearest iceberg. 

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