Titanic

It was gloomy the Sunday afternoon my sister and I visited the Titanic artifact exhibit at Kansas City's Union Station. My sister is a self-described Titanic history buff, so together we carved out some time to see the exhibit on April 15th,  the 100th anniversary of the Titanic's sinking.

At the very beginning of the exhibit we received boarding passes with the name of an actual passenger from the Titanic. My passenger, Elin Matilda Dolck Hakkarainen, was a 24-years-old, third-class woman from Helsinki, Finland. According to the boarding pass, Elin and her husband Pekka were fleeing the economic hardship and political oppression caused by the Russion occupation of Finland. 

The layout of the exhibit was mesmerizing, as the Titanic was first introduced us as a luxurious masterpiece of engineering and innovation. There were life-sized replicas of first- and third-class rooms, and a massive picture of the sweeping Grand Staircase. The artifacts themselves - which included everything from jewelry and gold-rimmed tea cups to tools and portholes - were remarkably well-preserved after being two and a half miles under the ocean for over 75 years. 

The cheerfulness of the beginning soon turned dark and ominous as we neared the iceberg. My sister noted the temperature seemed to drop the further along we were in the exhibit. By the time we learned of the events resulting in the sinking of the ship, we felt like the passengers on that night, boarding lifeboats over freezing water.

The very last leg of the exhibit included a wall featuring the names and classes of everyone who lived and died on the Titanic. I found that my passenger, Elin Hakkarainen, survived the sinking, although her husband did not. It was moving to see the other exhibit-goers crowd around the wall to see if their passenger was one of the mere 706 survivors (out of 2,223 passengers). That final wall made the whole story very real and very human.  

Lesson Learned: Make sure your ship has enough life boats.