Mom who lost husband, son on doomed sub gave her spot to her 19-year-old at the last minute
The woman who lost her husband and teenage son in the imploded Titanic sub said she spent four agonizing days “constantly looking” at the sea — only giving up hope after 96 hours, when she knew they would have run out of oxygen.
Christine Dawood told the BBC that she was initially supposed to be on the doomed dive with her 48-year-old husband, Shahzada — before she “stepped back and gave the space to Sulaiman,” their 19-year-old, Rubik’s Cube-obsessed son.
She instead stayed on the mothership, the Polar Prince, with her 17-year-old daughter, Alina, as the Titan started its mission on Father’s Day.
The mom said she was having a snack when word came through that they “had lost comms,” or communications, with the now-controversial sub that was run by a videogame controller.
“I didn’t comprehend at that moment what it meant — and then it just went downhill from there,” she said, admitting she is “not doing very good” coping with her double loss.
Still, others on the support vessel reassured her it was “not uncommon” to lose communications, she said — suggesting that it was never relayed to them that the US Navy had detected a sound that could have been an implosion.
“We all thought, ‘They’re just gonna come up,'” she said.
“We were constantly looking at the surface.”
That hope “was the only thing that got us through it,” even after the “not-so-good feelings started” at the time they knew the sub should have surfaced from its tour of the Titanic wreckage.
“I think I lost hope when we passed the 96-hours mark,” Darwood said of when she knew the Titan was supposed to have finally run out of air.
“That’s when I lost hope. And that’s when I even sent a message to my family onshore — I said, ‘I’m preparing for the worst,'” she admitted.
Alina, however, held out hope even longer.
“My daughter … didn’t lose hope until the call with Coast Guard, when they basically informed us that they found debris. That’s when she also lost hope,” the mom said.
Father and son died alongside Titan CEO Stockton Rush, 61, British Billionaire Hamish Harding, 58, and French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77.
“I miss them,” Darwood said of her husband and son. “I really, really miss them.”
Asked how she would “begin to get closure,” the grieving mom and wife said: “Is there such a thing? I don’t know.”
Despite another relative saying that Sulaiman had been “terrified” and reluctant to go on the doomed dive, Christine Dawood said that he’d actually only been upset when he thought he couldn’t go, because he was too young when they first booked it before the pandemic.
“Sulaiman was so disappointed because they only allowed 18-plus,” she said of the teen who hoped to break a world record for solving a Rubik’s Cube in the depths of the ocean.
It meant that the initial, pre-pandemic trip “was supposed to be Shahzada and I going down” — but when it was rescheduled, “I stepped back and gave the space to Sulaiman because he really wanted to go,” she said.
“I was really happy for them because both of them, they really wanted to do that for a very long time,” she said of the husband and son whom she “hugged and joked” with before they stepped into the sub.
The pain of knowing that switch cost her son his life was the one thing Dawood found too painful to discuss.
“Let’s just skip that,” she told the BBC.
