Last Titanic Survivor Dies

The last living survivor of the RMS Titanic passed away yesterday, an event which marked the formal passage of the world’s most famous maritime disaster into history – while at the same time causing that annoying Celine Dion song to once again firmly implant itself in our heads.

Yick.

Millvina Dean, a London native, was just two months old when the “unsinkable” ship collided with an iceberg in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic, killing 1,500 people – including her father.

From the AP:

Dean’s family were steerage passengers emigrating to the United States. Her father had sold his pub and hoped to open a tobacconists’ shop in Kansas City, Missouri, where his wife had relatives.

Initially scheduled to travel on another ship, the family was transferred to the Titanic because of a coal strike …

Dean said her father’s quick actions saved his family. He felt the ship scrape the iceberg and hustled the family out of its third-class quarters and toward the lifeboat that would take them to safety. “That’s partly what saved us — because he was so quick. Some people thought the ship was unsinkable,” Dean told the British Broadcasting Corp. in 1998.

Wrapped in a sack against the Atlantic chill, Dean was lowered into a lifeboat. Her 2-year-old brother Bertram and her mother Georgette also survived.

“She said goodbye to my father and he said he’d be along later,” Dean said in 2002. “I was put into lifeboat 13. It was a bitterly cold night and eventually we were picked up by the Carpathia.”

The family was taken to New York, then returned to England with other survivors aboard the rescue ship Adriatic. Dean did not know she had been aboard the Titanic until she was 8 years old, when her mother, about to remarry, told her about her father’s death. Her mother, always reticent about the tragedy, died in 1975 at age 95.

Amazing. To think of all the lives this tragedy touched (and still touches) …

Even more amazing, though, is how that damn Celine Dion song will not exit our cranium. Like, under any circumstances. Seriously, we’ve shot ourselves in the head at point-blank range six times now and it’s still stuck in there.

“Near … far … wherever you are …”

ARRRRGHHHHHH!!!!