The Last Of

We like to count. We like to know how many we started with. How many are gone. How many are left.

A USA Today reporter, Mike Lopresti commented in 2002 when the horse Seattle Slew passed away that he was the last of the living Triple Crown winners. "There were but 11 Triple Crown winners in the last century, only three in the last 54 years. And with Seattle Slew’s passing the other day, all of them are dead. This we know because living Triple Crown champions are kept track of like ex-presidents and Titanic survivors."

Millvina Dean, Last Survivor of the Titanic, Dies at 97

The Titanic sunk on April 14, 1912. I never used to remember the year until I bought one of those Legacy ancestral collages from The Times that frame out someone's record through Ellis Island, a copy of the front page of the paper the day they got to America, and a picture of the ship they traveled on. It's quite a display and I was able to find my grandfather's arrival with some last name variations and allowances for not counting all the birthdays.

What I landed on was actually my grandfather's third arrival in 1912, in May. I couldn't find the first, but I lucked out with the third one because there on the passenger list on the line below his name is that of his 18-year-old brother, Peter, who was brought over from Greece by his married 30-year-old brother.

And then I realized that 1912 was rather a 9/11/2001-type year for ocean-going travel. I have to think that anyone in the world who wasn't in a coma heard about the Titanic's sinking. It had to be on passengers' minds in May 1912 as they set out for America. Of course, leaving a Mediterranean country in May and crossing the Atlantic in warmer weather had to at least give them assurance that icebergs weren't going to get them, but something else could.

Well, they made it. And my grandfather and great-uncle spent the rest of their lives as close together as they were on that passenger list. My uncle never married and lived with his brother and my grandmother. And eventually their four sons.

Millvina Dean is described by the obituary writer, John Burns, as reluctant to draw attention to herself about what she survived. She was only 9 weeks old at the time, and survived with her mother and 2-year-old brother. But not her father.

When she gave a nursing home interview years ago she said that for decades after the sinking she never spoke of it or her part in it to people she met or worked with. She did not want to be seen as drawing attention to herself. Almost like the opening line from an Alice Fulton poem: "the universe's ignorance of me is privacy."

The obituary is a great piece about a watershed event of the 20th century. And the kind of people who survived it.

On 9/11/2001 there were an estimated 25,000 survivors of the World Trade Center terrorist attack. And there were survivors from the Pentagon attack. There were some small children in a day care center in one of the Center's smaller buildings. They were all retrieved by their parents or guardians. I doubt any were as young as 2 months old, but they were pre-schoolers.

A hundred years from 2001 it will be 2101. There is no official list of who the 25,000 or so are who survived 9/11. So, we don't know how many we've started with. So we won't know who will be the last.

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