by Bud Sturguess

image c/o India Times

“Life is a tragedy to him who feels and a comedy to him who thinks.”

– Horace Walpole

Of course I laughed at the memes. Just about all of us did. There’s no shame in admitting you had a good chuckle when you saw a meme lampooning the Titan submersible disaster. Especially the ones that were Spongebob themed; those were the best.

I suppose we felt it was okay to laugh because the guys on the submarine were so filthy rich. It was kind of telling, the mood of the average citizens, that we were so disdainful of the wealthy that we didn’t hide our giddiness when they embarked on such a typical “rich guy thing” and imploded. I guess it’s part of that “eat the rich” mentality we’ve harbored so long.

We even told ourselves it was okay to laugh despite the fact that among the five dead was a 19-year-old kid, the son of one of the rich guys, who hadn’t done anything harmful to anybody with his wealth (that is, his parents’ wealth). Then again, I don’t know that his parents did anything wrong by anybody with their wealth either. But, just being rich was sinful enough for us. That’s what being broke and struggling will do to you: you’ll laugh out loud – literally LOL – at the horrific death of five rich people. The fact that the leader of the expedition to explore the wreck of the Titanic had been warned that he’d built the Ford Pinto of submarines, and paid no heed, just gave us more of a license to laugh.

This may be a bold claim, but I think that even if the passengers hadn’t been so rich, we’d have still found humor in their demise. It’s an objectively hilarious death. It’s a news story you’d expect to include the words “Florida man…”

Last week, my grandfather passed away at the ripe old age of 92. His death was the result of kidney failure, not a trip in a haphazard submarine. Being the grandson who lived the closest to him, it fell on me to sort through his possessions for an estate sale: what to keep and what to sell to thrift shoppers who have a slightly bigger budget (not Titan submersible budget, but eat-at-Chili’s-every-day budget).

There were lots of obvious things to sell: furniture, the more modern of his electronics, his tools, some of his clothes. But there were plenty of neat antiques and curios I just couldn’t bring myself to sell to a stranger. Some of it should seriously be in a local museum – an Edward Brooke senate campaign button, Red Sox trading cards from the 1940s, a picture of my great-uncle Leon shaking hands with a very elderly Robert Frost. But what I found in one conspicuously roomy box grabbed my attention more than Doug Flutie’s autograph. 

The box was big enough to hold a dozen or so small books, but all it contained was a leather-bound diary. Instantly intrigued, I opened the frail old book and saw my grandfather’s father’s name written with shoddy penmanship inside the front cover. The first entry was dated February 3, 1915. My great-grandfather would have been 23 years old then. It was a relatively short entry, but a significant one. In it, he rejoiced at the birth of his and my great-grandmother’s first child, James. He was the first of what would be nine children (my grandfather being the youngest, born in 1931).

Of my nine great-uncles and great-aunts, eight would survive to adulthood. My grandfather had told me he had an older sister who died long before he was born, at about the age of two. He never went into detail about what happened, but given the mortality rate among small children in those days, I assumed the cause to be one of those diseases for which vaccines weren’t so readily available. Spanish flu, maybe.

But yesterday, engrossed in my great-grandfather’s diary, I learned all about the terrible death of my great-aunt Deborah.

Among the many typical entries in the diary – the purchase of a used Model T, a brutal snow storm, short, sour rants about Woodrow Wilson – one was written in more lively language than the rest. It was the birth of Deborah, or Debbie, my great-grandparents’ second child, on October 28, 1916. My great-grandfather wrote, unusually giddy for the more stoic men of those days:

“Debbie hasn’t been part of the population eight hours and she’s already got us wrapped around her finger. Little James is not only curious about the new baby but, despite being a babe himself, his face is lit up with excitement at the arrival of a sister. I’m sure I’ve had the same look on my face all day.”  

It was a sweet thing to read. I never met my grandfather’s dad, but this wasn’t the kind of thing I imagined Bostonian men writing in their journals in 1916. 

Mundane entries followed, sprinkled with a few detailed stories about something Debbie had done, both cute and worrisome; one particular entry in which she took a nasty spill down the fire escape stairs showed my great-grandfather just about praying on paper for her survival, his handwriting a panicky scribble. Reading it, I began to conclude this was how the poor girl died, but she made a full recovery from her fall.

Several pages later, however, and my great-grandfather’s penmanship became labored and almost scrawled. He’d suddenly gone from cursive to plain block letters. Dated January 15, 1919, written in what looked like something you’d find scratched on the wall of a prison cell, were the words

“North End flooded with molasses. Debbie is dead. The light is gone from my eyes.”

All my life I’ve heard about the “Great Molasses Flood,” as it’s called. You probably have, too, being that it’s such a bizarre, almost novel event in American history: a large storage tank containing over 12,000 tons of molasses suddenly burst, causing a tsunami of syrup to flood the streets of the North End of Boston. Over 20 people died, including young children.

It hit my heart like a sledgehammer – my great-aunt Deborah, just a little over two years old, was killed in the legendary Great Molasses Flood.

The only entry after January 15, again in capital block letters, though smaller now and not as maniacally scrawled, read

“January 20, 1919:

Debbie buried today.

Oct. 28, 1916 – January 15, 1919.”

The remaining yellowed, fragile pages of the diary are completely blank.

My grandfather never described his dad as a stony or sorrowful man. He never mentioned catching a glimpse of him secretly looking at a photo of his lost child with a watery gaze in his eyes. But I have to conclude, looking through the sheer delight and sudden devastation in that diary, that my great-grandfather, whatever he was like day-to-day, weathered plenty of dark and quiet moments for the rest of his life.

Whenever I heard of the Great Molasses Flood, I used to grin and think, “how do you not outrun molasses?” It must have looked like a scene from Ghostbusters II, the evil slime oozing down streets and tunnels. I mean, molasses is used as a metaphor for slowness; how could anybody fail to escape a “flood” of it? Or did big fat globs of syrup rain down from the sky and trap whoever they landed on, like a mosquito in an amber fossil?

For me, it was an objectively funny way to die. Just like the Titan submersible tragedy. How? I’d wonder bemusedly. How do you get killed that way? There must be a lot I don’t understand about the physics of molasses.

Physics or not, all I know now, and all I need to know, is that this weird, surreal event, so funny and so meme-worthy (if memes had existed in 1919 there would have been plenty), broke a man’s heart. It broke a lot of hearts. At least twenty. And it took the life of a little girl who had her entire life ahead of her. Though I didn’t know until yesterday that my own great-aunt was among the victims, I should have known that, as strange a death as it may have been, plenty of hearts were broken that January day in 1919. I have no excuse for taking so long to comprehend something so obvious.

It was an eerie bit of serendipity that today, YouTube recommended a video that fit right into this strange daze I’ve found myself in after reading the diary: a clip of an interview with Christine Dawood, the widow of Shahzada Dawood, and the mother of Suleman Dawood, two of the Titan submersible victims. 

In a devastating turn of events, Christine was supposed to go with her husband on the underwater voyage, but she gave her spot to 19-year-old Suleman because of his desire to see the Titanic. In a voice low and choked with grief, she described her son. He never went anywhere without his Rubik’s Cube. He was fascinated by it and hoped to solve it in the submarine on his way to the ocean floor.

Christine, holding back tears, related the heartbreaking impact of the words “we lost com” – communication. 

I can’t stop thinking about Suleman and his Rubik’s Cube. I picture this young man twisting and turning the plastic cube, his mind working to solve it, a mind that could have gone on to do brilliant things, or even think the most mundane thoughts that the living take for granted: thoughts of how nice the clouds look on a particular day, wondering how a friend is healing after surgery, or even thoughts mourning a tragedy. 

The image of the Rubik’s Cube gives way to that of a lonesome teddy bear with no one to cuddle it, a game of hopscotch drawn in chalk on a sidewalk in Boston, slowly faded by wind, rain, and even molasses. I think of the undeniable fact that if I’d been alive in 1919, of no relation to this little girl, and had access to the internet, I’d have L’d-OL at memes making light of the Great Molasses Flood. 

It’s a thought so sad and sobering I feel like my heart’s been turned to syrup. I’ll never laugh at a Titan submersible Spongebob meme again.

— — —

(Interview with Christine Dawood, source: BBC News)

XXX 

Bud Sturguess was born in the small cotton-and-oil town of Seminole, Texas. He now lives in his “adopted hometown,” Amarillo. Sturguess has self-published several books, his latest being the novel “Sick Things.” He is a collector of neckties.

Bud’s most recent previous story for us was “No Romance on Mount Nebo.”