A MOTHER who lost her husband and son on the Titanic submersible has spoken out on the heartbreak of losing half her family.
Christine Dawood, 48, is still coming to terms with the death of her husband of 20 years, Shahzada, and their precious son, Suleman, seven months after they perished at sea.
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Her last memory of the pair is seeing them climbing into the Titan submersible – something Christine admits she was supposed to do instead of her 19-year-old boy.
“We’d started talking about it in 2018,” she told the Daily Mail. “I was supposed to go with my husband but, because of the delay with Covid, Suleman turned 18 and he wanted to go.”
Christine continued: “I hardly interacted with them [the night before] because I was throwing up so much. I went to bed pretty early.”
The following morning, Christine said her husband was “literally glowing” because he was so excited, while her son was also thrilled to be sharing this experience with his father.
Suleman had even decided to break the tedium of that four-hour journey into the deep by solving a Rubik’s cube at 3,700 metres below the ocean surface.
But according to his aunt, Suleman had supposedly said that he was “terrified” about the trip.
Azmeh Dawood, the older sister of Mr Dawood, said her nephew “wasn’t very up for it” and felt compelled to please his dad.
Christine still has her 18-year-old daughter, Alina, with the reality of losing half of her family on that tragic day has really sunk in.
“I am widowed and I lost a child and I’m not even 50. I’m 48,” she said.
Despite the life-changing travesty, Christine can take some form of comfort from the fact that her husband and son did not suffer after being killed in “milliseconds”.
According to a spokesman for the US Coast Guard, debris found in the search for the missing sub was consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber”.
Nonetheless, the family home in Surrey is a lot emptier.
Christine told the Daily Mail that she does not even have graves for Shahzada and Suleman.
But on a recent trip to Singapore, the sea was warm enough for her and Alina to walk in and “feel” her husband and son around them.
Christine said that every time she steps into the ocean, she’ll be able to connect with them “because they are part of it”.
Had Christine gone on that trip instead of her son, things would have been completely different.
While her husband still would have died, her death would have left her children parentless.
Nonetheless, Christine has instead channelled any anger and ill-feelings towards OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush.
Experts have since claimed that Mr Rush ignored the warning signs that his vessel was unsafe – leading to his own death and taking the lives of four others.
The two other men on the titan submersible were British billionaire Hamish Harding and French diver Paul-Henry Nargeolet.
The four passengers had joined CEO Rush for an expensive $250,000 (£196,000) journey that took a select few 13,000 feet below the surface to view the wreckage of the Titanic.
Christine said that Stockton is not her “favourite person” in this mess.
With the turn of a new year, however, she is hoping to bring some light into the dark as she continues living without half of her family.
In October, new evidence and presumed human remains were recovered from the ocean floor months after the Titan submarine imploded.
The presumed human remains were to be analysed by US medical professionals, while the other evidence was transferred to a US port for cataloguing and examination.
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