Titanic's last passenger...

So, as if I was making some kinf of prophecy, yesterday, the last survivor of the Titanic sinking, died aged 97 years old... Millvina Dean was only 9 weeks old when she embarked the ship, being the youngest person aboard, so it's quite obvious she didn't remember anything about the shipwreck... However, she always thought it had shaped her life, as she ysed to say, because she was going to live in the United States, but after the death of her father in the wreck, she had to return to the United Kingdom...

In her last she was forced to sell some of her Titanic mementoes to pay her bills, just for example a canvas mailbag, relic of her rescue... Lately, some of the people involved in the filming of the multiawarded movie Titanic, like Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet or James Cameron contributed towards her care costs by donating 40.000 $ to the Millvina Fund, set up by her friends...

For her and her family, the journey began by chance. They had booked tickets to another White Star ship, but because of a coal strike, they were transfered to the Titanic...

At 11:40 PM, that 14th of April 1912, baby Millvina was asleep in her cot when her father heard a crash, woke the family and told them to dress warmly.

"It was so dreadful for my mother," Millvina later recalled. "It was heartbreaking. "She said goodbye to my father and he said he'd be along later." Millvina Dean said her father's quick actions had saved his family. He had felt the ship scrape the iceberg and hustled the family out of its room and towards the lifeboat that would take them to safety. "That's partly what saved us – because he was so quick," she explained.

A sailor bundled her into a sack and put her into lifeboat 13, which was lowered into the freezing Atlantic. It was a cold night, but after several hours Millvina, her mother Ettie, and brother Bertram were picked up by the Carpathia.

The surviving Deans returned to England aboard the liner Adriatic, Millvina being the object of some astonishment that such a tiny baby should have made it to safety. First and second class passengers on Adriatic queued to hold her, and many took photographs of her, her mother and brother, some of which accompanied breathless stories in the newspapers.

The Daily Mirror, for example, reported that Millvina "was the pet of the liner during the voyage, and so keen was the rivalry between women to nurse this lovable mite of humanity that one of the officers decreed that first and second class passengers might hold her in turn for no more than 10 minutes".

And that's all! No more witnesses of the most famous shipwreck in all history... Isn't it sad? It is very sad for me... Historians can't do nothing without people's stories... And so, this keeps happening and happening... What's next? Every soldier of Wolrd War I will die... and in Spain, all those people who had lived personally our Civil War will die... No more grandpa's stories near a bonfire... No more anecdotes, no more lap-stories to grandchildren... Only History books left... Don't misunderstand me, I love History books, but... it's not the same!

So, Requiescat in Pace, Millvina...