Herbert and Sofia

Have you ever wanted to turn back the time to just to save one person who could have sent your life into a different trajectory? I know I have. Each of our lives are interwoven in the net of life. Some catches turn putrid before the new day arrives and others just stew into a sweet fragrance, but neither has the power to manifest a known change for generations past the first cast. Three days ago, marked the 110 anniversaries of such a cast. In a matter of three hours, my life was changed. My inheritance that I did not realize I might have had sank to the bottoms of the frigid Artic. The inheritance that might have saved my husband in need of a heart transplant. It was not until last year that I even knew I had lost it. The Titanic was the ship of opulence; the ship that could not sink; the ship that sank my life because one spouse lived, and one spouse died.

Sofia was a sickly child as she faded in and out on numerous occasions hovering between life and death. Yet, she survived every ailment like a miracle handed down from Heaven, time and time again. Then, she boarded the Titanic with her husband Herbert. Herbert was everything she had never been wealthy, strong, educated and filled with dreams. Sofia’s dream was simply to survive, to smell a rose one more time, to hear the laughter of the other children as they ran past her. She knew that if she could hear the laughter, she knew that there was hope for her too. If they could be strong enough to run, so could she. That determination is what had drawn Herbert to her.

The determination also inspired Herbert to purchase their fated seat onto the Titanic just days before it would set sail. There is no record of Sofia and Herbert listed because their paperwork had not even been entered by the time it sank. They were the 14th set of Honeymooners on the Titanic. Even as they had furiously packed for the voyage, they knew they would have to run to catch the vessel before it set out. They should have slowed their progress. Herbert always wished that they had. They shared a beautiful last meal. But for the first time in years, Sofia did not feel well after all the excitement of the wedding, the surprise honeymoon destination to New York, and the richness of the deserts on board. Sofia decided she like the American Ice Cream far better than the egg-based concoction of the French, but perhaps there was enough eggs in the French Ice Cream to have tipped the scales to a fatal illness.

Herbert decided to stay and listen to the musicians for a bit longer at his new wife’s instance. Whatever happened next trapped his wife in her room with waters flooding in and finding no way for Herbert in his strength to save his wife. He tried but he knew she was gone. It was just impossible for him to save her as the sinking ship continued to take on water. It was at that moment of realization his precious Sofia was gone that he began to drink. Soon, someone passed by him, and it would be no other than Charles Joughin, a ship’s chef. I read in a National Post article written by Tristin Hopper back on the 107th anniversary of the Titanic sinking where a person by the name of Giesbrecht that “the average adult is a big chunk of meat and it takes a lot of energy to cool it off.”

One of those pieces of meat that the drunk Chef would accidentally knock into the ice-cold ocean was another man shocked sober, my great-grandfather Herbert. That moment he could not save his wife was the moment he began drinking and he never stopped until he was completely broken, penniless and living in a state asylum with tuberculosis. It was there he died. If I could have saved that one person, his wife, perhaps she would have died a more natural death that would have left him whole for the time that he met my great-grandmother who liked to dance on the tables and drink men under them. My great-grandmother and great-grandfather passed like two ships in the night and the secret was revealed last year when my grandmother took her last 5 minutes of breath.

She did not know what had happened to the Herbert of the night. She only knew of the tale given to her during the day. And I found the rest of the story after digging through all the ancestry genetic dot coms that are available today. Through the faint details and reported hospitalization records to find that my great-grandfather had wasted his fortune, his fame, and his future on a bottle of booze first found on the sinking titanic. Sofia who had been so sick who had overcome so much was doomed to find those near deaths grasping her last breath from her anyway and the love of her life who she inspired was haunted by the last breath he never heard for over 20 years before he died of the broken heart that first cracked on April 15th, 1911. He died at 2:15 AM, the exact same time that the drunken chef knocked him into the waters that gave him his life back as shocking as it was for the 90 seconds of ‘cold shock’ in which he thought he too was dying.