Walking into Christine Dawood’s kitchen, you can’t help but notice the model Titanic right in the middle of the room. It sits inside its own glass-fronted cabinet—a Lego ship nearly 1.5 meters long, built from 9,090 of those classic plastic bricks. Her 19-year-old son Suleman spent almost two weeks putting it together. “People are always a bit shocked to see it,” she admits. “But what was I supposed to do? Take it apart? Hide it away? Suleman put all those hours into it. He’d been fascinated with the Titanic ever since we went to a huge exhibition when we lived in Singapore.”
I went to that same exhibition when it came to London, and I remember being amazed by the china dinner plates that had survived without a scratch; the unused lifejackets that couldn’t save anyone; the sheet music from the orchestra who supposedly kept playing bravely as the ship went down. Instead of a ticket, you got a replica boarding pass with a real passenger’s name on it. At the end, you could check who lived and who didn’t.
On June 18, 2023, Suleman Dawood died alongside his 48-year-old father, Shahzada, and three other men in the Titan submersible as it tried to dive to the Titanic. They were 500 meters above the wreck when the sub imploded. It was a horrifying tragedy that made headlines around the world.
“The Titanic was claiming another five people, right?” Dawood says. “And my son’s age was a big deal. I think that’s another reason the press latched onto it. If it had been five grown men, it might not have been as interesting.”
We’re in the family home in Surrey, where she lives with her 20-year-old daughter. Dawood is understandably protective of her. “I don’t want her to be known as that girl who lost her father and brother on the Titan,” she tells me. “She’s just starting her life, and I’d rather keep her out of it. But she understands that I do want to talk now.” Floor-to-ceiling windows cover one whole side of the room. She needs that light and space, Dawood says, after growing up in the mountains of Bavaria. On the walls hang richly colored Pakistani art, mostly gifts from her in-laws, who she’s still very close to. “I still love this house,” she tells me. “Even though they’re not here anymore.” Dawood, a trained psychologist, is speaking in detail for the first time; she’s also written a book telling her story.
A media frenzy broke out when news came that the Titan was missing. Rumors spread. Was the sub trapped inside the wreck itself? Or floating adrift in the North Atlantic? Reports said the stricken craft had just four days of oxygen. A countdown began; social media was gripped by the fate of the little sub. And as details came out about the men on board, word spread that Dawood was supposed to be on the sub herself, but had given her ticket to her son.
Almost three years on, she holds onto the advice she got when she came ashore after the four-day search. “It was one of the Canadian Coast Guards,” she remembers. “A very experienced woman with blond hair—I forget her name—gave me the best advice I’ve ever gotten: ‘Hindsight won’t help you, so don’t fall into that trap. Just because you know it now… you didn’t know it before.’ I’ve always remembered her telling me that. Suleman wanted to go, and I was happy to give up the seat. I was happy for him to make memories with his father. I can’t change that.”
During the 2020 lockdown, Dawood came across an ad for “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”The chance to dive to the Titanic. The family had recently gotten a puppy, a Bernese Mountain Dog named Stig, who stays close to Dawood while we talk. “I was scrolling through Instagram,” she recalls, “seeing lots of puppy pictures and that kind of thing, when a photo of a submersible popped up right next to the Titanic. I couldn’t believe it, so I called Quintessentially, our personal travel agency. They called themselves lifestyle managers, and we paid them a pretty big yearly membership. They’d arranged incredible trips for us before, to Antarctica and Greenland. So when they got back to me and said this was possible, we were excited.”
OceanGate, founded by CEO Stockton Rush in 2009, was indeed promoting tourist dives to the famous wreck. The American’s mission was to make the deep ocean accessible to everyone. In 2013, Rush started working on the Titan, a submersible he believed would be as indestructible as its namesake was said to be. Its experimental design went against proven submersible engineering. The carbon fiber hull and cylindrical shape replaced the traditional, reliable structures of titanium or high-strength steel spheres, which are known to withstand deep-sea pressure.
On paper, this dive seemed easy. It was possible and convenient. We were always the glampers among explorers.
At first, Dawood suggested they try a shallow dive to get used to being locked inside the 6.7-meter-long submersible. But Shahzada was firm: he wanted to go straight to the Titanic. “If I’m doing a dive, I want to do it properly,” he told her. “That’s what made him successful in business,” she says. “You set a clear goal, and you go for it. But he wasn’t an adrenaline junkie. If I’d suggested bungee jumping, he’d have said, ‘No way!’ He wouldn’t do what Jeff Bezos did and go up in a rocket, because you need to be physically fit and train. He wouldn’t have done that. On paper, this dive looked comfortable. You just sit there, right? He didn’t need to be fit. It was possible and convenient. We were always the glampers of the explorers.”
The world was slow to recover from COVID restrictions, so Dawood added the trip to the family bucket list. For the next two years, she didn’t follow OceanGate’s expeditions. Life got busy again with work and school. They went on a Mediterranean cruise with her in-laws from Pakistan after not seeing them for a long time. In September 2022, Suleman started a new chapter, studying business at the University of Strathclyde.
Dreams of exploring the deep ocean were forgotten until late 2022, when Quintessentially called to ask if they were still interested in visiting the Titanic. “It was a ton of money,” admits Dawood – “$500,000 for two seats! The kind of money I’d expect to pay for a house.” She laughs a little, shaking her head at the cost now. But the family could afford it – Shahzada came from one of Pakistan’s wealthiest families – and they began planning to join OceanGate’s 2023 expedition. “Whatever research I did,” she tells me, “I didn’t find a single accident involving a civilian submersible. That was good enough for me. I hardly knew OceanGate, so my trust was based on Quintessentially.”
In a statement, Quintessentially said that the services they provide to members are confidential, but clarified that they never had a commercial relationship with OceanGate, promoted any of their expeditions, or recommended them to members. They said they “will continue to be supportive to the Dawood family.”
In February 2023, Rush and his wife Wendy, OceanGate’s director of communications, flew from Seattle to London to meet the Dawoods. In a café on the South Bank, Rush set about reassuring them that the trip would be worth every cent. He boasted about how unique the Titan was. No other submersible…He told them the sub could take up to five people to the deep ocean. He had already made dreams come true by taking it to the Titanic 13 times. He described the strange ocean creatures and the flashes of blue, green, and eerie white bioluminescence they would see drifting past the large viewing port—”the largest on planet Earth,” as he liked to call it—and finally, how they would reach the wreck itself. They would glide toward the iconic bow, covered in rusticles, the micro-organisms slowly eating through the great ship’s skeleton.
An undated photograph of the Titan making a descent. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
“We had never even been snorkeling,” says Dawood. “And Shahzada got so caught up in Rush’s stories. But Wendy was very quiet. Then the conversation turned to communication between the sub and the ship. Stockton said, ‘Yeah, sometimes we lose contact.’ I noticed Wendy’s whole body go stiff. ‘We don’t like it when that happens,’ she told him. ‘If you don’t tell us where you are, we worry.’ I felt the tension between them; she couldn’t get through to him. I think she saw the risks; she saw that something might not be right. He just ignored her.”
There was a lot that Rush had simply ignored—things Dawood would only learn after the tragedy. He hadn’t told them about the many aborted dives and hundreds of technical issues that had plagued the Titan during its two short seasons in the North Atlantic. Or that in July 2022, while ascending, passengers had heard an explosive noise that shook the submersible, which Rush never investigated. Or that the sub was operating under the radar, that he had refused to have it inspected or classified by any maritime authority, claiming the safety process was too slow and “stifled innovation.” The Titan was not, in fact, registered to carry passengers at all. As the couples shook hands, the Rushes failed to mention that for the past six months, the Titan had been sitting in a parking lot in St John’s, uncovered and unwatched, exposed to the icy conditions of the Newfoundland winter.
On June 14, the family set off with a mix of nervous excitement. “We’d all been so busy,” Dawood remembers. “And this was the start of a family adventure, that’s how we saw it.” They missed their connecting flight to St John’s, so by the time they arrived, they had to jump straight aboard the Polar Prince, a ship that would take them 400 miles southeast across the North Atlantic to Titanic waters. Unbeknownst to Dawood, funds were running low, and the Polar Prince was all Rush could afford. An old icebreaker, the ship wasn’t originally designed to carry passengers, and its spoon-shaped hull pitched and rolled constantly. In 2021 and 2022, OceanGate had hired a modern ship, the Horizon Arctic, which carried the Titan on deck. It was impossible to carry the sub onboard the Polar Prince, so it was towed behind on a platform, battered and pounded by the waves. “This was the roughest we’d ever traveled,” Dawood admits. “I’m almost 50, and you put me in a bunk bed with scratchy sheets! Cruise ships have nice stabilizers, and you pay $500,000 for this?” But she laughs and tells me how they joked about it.
That month, Newfoundland had been enjoying unusually warm weather. A sea fog rolled gently along the rocky coast, and a few icebergs lingered to the north. The capelin had arrived near the shore in their millions, and there had been excited sightings of more than 300 humpback whales as the huge mammals feasted on the tiny fish. But out in the Atlantic, where the Polar Prince was headed, a heavy fog persisted. Since the start of their 2023 expedition, OceanGate had not managed a single dive below 10 meters.
View image in fullscreen: Christine Dawood, photographed at home. Photograph: Cian Oba-Smith/The Guardian
“We didn’tDawood says, “I didn’t have much time to think or get too nervous. We were on the ship for two days getting out there, and by then I was really seasick. So when the crew said the weather had cleared up and the dive was on, my plan was to see them off and then try to sleep until they came back.”
Shahzada and Suleman wore jumpsuits like the ones astronauts use, with their names and the OceanGate logo on them. They were joined by Rush, who was piloting, a British businessman named Hamish Harding, and French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, known as “Mr. Titanic” because he was the world’s top expert on the wreck. He had already seen the ship 37 times, five of them on the Titan, and worked as OceanGate’s expert guide.
“It was one of those moments where you turn to dark humor,” Dawood remembers. “We were talking about crashes. I recall Hamish saying he’d never travel by helicopter—he thought they were too dangerous. Suleman had his Rubik’s Cube because he wanted to set the record for solving it at the deepest depth ever. And we were laughing because Shahzada is clumsy, and when he went down the stairs, he wobbled a bit. I waved. And that was it. They got into a small boat and sped off. The goodbye happened very fast.”
Dawood watched as her husband and son were taken to the Titan, floating about 100 meters away on its launch and recovery platform. The two divers there pulled them onto the unstable structure and guided them into the sub one by one. “Have a great dive,” one said to Suleman as he helped him inside. The hatch was bolted shut, and the flotation tanks at each corner of the platform were filled with water. The Titan sank beneath the waves, detached from the platform, and began its freefall. It would take about three hours to reach the wreck, 2.5 miles down on the ocean floor.
Around 11 a.m., Dawood was in the dining area, hoping for a seasickness cure, when the first bad news hit. “They’ve lost communication,” she heard someone say. Then they noticed her. “Don’t worry, that’s not unusual,” she was told. “At that moment, what was I supposed to do?” she says now. “I felt trapped on that ship, and I had no choice but to trust what they told me.” The OceanGate crew seemed calm. They had been through this before, and everything would be fine. The sub would still be back by 3 p.m.
It’s hard to imagine how long the next hours must have felt. Constantly scanning the horizon for any sign of the submersible, mistaking whitecaps for the Titan’s tail popping up from the ocean. In the communications room where Wendy Rush was stationed, the tracking screen stayed blank, and the text console was silent.
“I told myself they were stuck. But I was worried. Both my men aren’t great with being in the dark, and I knew it would be a very different kind of darkness down there. Nothing. You literally can’t see a thing.”
At 6:30 p.m., there was still no sign of the Titan. Kyle Bingham, OceanGate’s mission director, called a meeting and announced that the Titan was now officially missing. Dawood struggles to describe what it felt like hearing those words. “It’s like an avalanche,” she tells me. “You see it coming. This is it, I’m going to be hit. But you’re on a cliff, so where can you go? I had to make a conscious choice. I knew I couldn’t let the emotions take over. So, I grew wings and flew away in my mind. That’s how I saved myself from the avalanche.”
“I told myself they were stuck,” she says. “But I was worried. Suleman isn’t… well, both my men aren’t very good at being in the dark, and I knew it would be a completely different darkness down there. Nothing. You literally can’t see a thing.”She remembers drinking the condensation on the sub walls through straws. She recalls that the OceanGate doctor gave her something for seasickness and asked one of the other tourists—who had been hoping to go on the next dive—to “keep an eye on her.” She remembers wandering around the ship, desperate for news but afraid of what she might overhear. “There were lots of hushed voices,” she tells me. “They stopped when I got close, but I overheard them saying their water could run out and maybe they’d drink the condensation on the sub walls through straws… I didn’t need those thoughts in my head, so I tried not to listen. I deleted all news from my phone. I wasn’t even really aware of the oxygen countdown. All the crew had told me was that they could last four days down there, no more.”
As the search and rescue operation got underway, the skies above the Polar Prince were filled with the trails of planes sent by the US and Canadian Coast Guards. Back in St. John’s, the media gathered at the harbor, press conferences were held, theories were discussed, and rumors spread about a toxic culture at OceanGate—that Stockton Rush had ignored countless warnings about his operation, and that he had dismissed safety as a waste of time. The truth was starting to come out.
But, 400 miles out at sea, Dawood was completely dependent on the company’s briefings. “The energy on the ship was complete denial,” she says. “The crew acted like nothing was happening.” Bingham kept predicting there had been a technical issue, but that Rush and Nargeolet were skilled enough to bring the sub back to the surface. He talked about banging sounds that had been heard. “Regular and significant,” he reassured everyone. They were trying to figure out where it was coming from, whether the men were sending an SOS from inside the Titan. “It’s just taking time,” he told them. “It did cross my mind that OceanGate had ulterior motives for what they told us,” admits Dawood. “They were just trying to avoid the truth. But I would have fallen apart a lot quicker without hope.”
A schedule was released to help the onboard crew pass the time. Jamming sessions were arranged, movies were chosen, and a nightly poker game was organized. “Ultimately, I think they wanted to distract people, keep everyone busy,” Dawood believes. “They wanted everyone on their side, not to feed anything to the press. But jamming sessions? Was I really going to sit there and sing Kumbaya? I did try to give a movie a go, but when I got there, it felt like an act of betrayal. Watching Wayne’s World while they were trapped in the dark didn’t sit well with me.”
As I try to imagine the surreal scene she’s just described, out of the corner of my eye, I notice a purple plate with a small handprint and Suleman’s name painted underneath, displayed on the sideboard. I realize that for the first time today, Dawood’s eyes are starting to well up with tears.
View image in fullscreen
Stockton Rush photographed inside the Titan. Photograph: BBC/ Take Me To Titan (BBC Travelshow)/ Simon Platts
On June 22, the Horizon Arctic arrived at the scene carrying a remotely operated vehicle capable of diving to the depth of the Titanic. It was deployed immediately and reached the bottom 90 minutes later. Scanning the seabed with its robotic gaze, it sent footage back to the operators above and to the US Coast Guard, which was now in charge. As the vehicle was guided around, they spotted something at the edge of the frame. The twisted remains of the Titan’s tail cone came into view. “Every indication at this point is that a catastrophic event has occurred with the Titan,” were the carefully chosen words of the US Coast Guard officer on a call to the Polar Prince. Wendy Rush and OceanGate were forced to face the truth that some of them had suspected from the start. The Titan’s hull had failed almost three hours into the dive. Under the immense pressure of the deep ocean, it had imploded, crushing everything inside.They collapsed inward in a fraction of a second. The five men died instantly.
“My first thought was, thank God,” Dawood admits. “When they said catastrophic, I knew Shahzada and Suleman didn’t even know what was happening. One moment they were there, and the next they weren’t. Knowing they didn’t suffer has meant so much. They’re gone, but the way it happened somehow makes it easier.”
That’s when Dawood found herself in what she calls “the after.” “In some ways, I was terrified to leave that strange bubble,” she says. The last bit of hope she had held onto in the middle of the ocean was gone, and she had to deal with the practical side of getting home. “What was I going to do with their things? Their bags? Shahzada’s clothes and belongings were in my cabin, so I packed his bags. But I couldn’t pack Suleman’s. I just couldn’t. Someone else did that.”
Before getting off the ship at St John’s, she was told to disguise herself, and she managed to avoid the cameras. Shahzada’s family had flown from Pakistan to take her back to London. She carried Suleman’s backpack onto the plane and remembers how much it meant to her mother-in-law. “She just wanted to hug the backpack,” Dawood recalls. “She held onto it the whole way and kept apologizing, saying I could take it back. But I said, ‘No, you keep it. You lost them too.'”
Over the next 18 months, the US Coast Guard conducted a forensic investigation into Stockton Rush and OceanGate. The fatal flaws that had been waiting to cause disaster came to light, along with the many warnings Rush had ignored. Dawood was advised it would be too much for her to attend the public hearings, and she still protects herself by being very careful about how many of the details she learns. The official report concluded the tragedy was preventable and caused by poor engineering and testing, as well as Rush’s reckless behavior. If he had survived, he would have faced criminal charges. Tighter rules for passenger submersibles have been recommended, but it’s all far too late for Dawood and her family.
“From the start, I had plenty of reasons to hate Stockton, but does that really help me?” Dawood says. “He died with them. If I’m angry at him, I’m giving him power, and I refuse to do that. I’m sure people will say I’m naive, but if I start analyzing every little thing, where does that get me? So, I choose my own… not happiness, but… I choose me, every day. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be here. I would have killed myself, for sure.” Dawood pauses, then continues in a whisper. “It’s very hard. Being strong doesn’t mean you’re not feeling it.”
She tells me there have been days when panic attacks have completely paralyzed her. When the lights felt too bright and any sound too loud. Everything became a struggle. She says that even after many hours of intense therapy, Suleman’s room is still the way he left it, and her husband’s study is untouched.
“I’ve learned to give the grief attention,” she sighs. “So I go into Suleman’s room. Sometimes I find the cat sleeping on his pillow, and I sit on the bed and let the grief come. And after a while, I can put the grief away until the next time it gets too much. I’ve worked a lot on my grief for Suleman, but I’m only now starting to grieve for my husband. People always group them together publicly, but they were two different relationships. Two very different pains.”
“We didn’t get the bodies for nine months,” she adds. “Well, when I say bodies, I mean the slush that was left. They came in two small boxes, like shoeboxes.” The slush, as she calls it, is the remains that…The items were recovered from the seabed, carefully separated, and DNA-tested by the US Coast Guard. “There wasn’t much they could find,” she says. “They have a big pile they can’t separate—all mixed DNA—and they asked if I wanted some of that too. But I said no, just what you know is Suleman and Shahzada.”
After a while, Dawood takes me out into the garden. The dog follows us. It’s the first sunny day after weeks of rain, and the cat has found a small patch of sunlight on one of the raised beds. The dog sits heavily but good-naturedly on my foot, and Dawood encourages him to come back to her side. “In a way, the dog reminds me of Suleman sometimes,” she says. “Because he’s clumsy, not spatially aware. He doesn’t know his own strength, and Suleman was sometimes awkward, didn’t quite know what to do with his physical strength. He was 19, just becoming a man.”
Recently, Dawood walked from Hampton Court to her son’s university in Glasgow. The journey took five weeks and was something Suleman had often said he’d like to do. She walked in tribute to him. She also tells me about her advanced plans to set up a grief and trauma center, and hearing her excitement, I can see how important these are for her own healing.
“It’s the normal questions people ask that are still the hardest,” she says, stroking the dog’s neck. “Like, ‘Do you have children?’ That’s the most dreaded question. I knew it would come, but it constantly catches me off guard. What do I say? I have two children, but… if I say that, then they ask, ‘What does your older one do?’ So now I avoid saying children. I just say I have a daughter. I’m not lying, but it’s what I choose to say.”
We sit quietly for a minute or two. It’s not easy finding a way to end our conversation about this unimaginable grief. But then Dawood turns her attention to the garden. “I’m waiting for the tulips now,” she says. “I have hundreds of them, and more come up every spring.” As I look closely, I notice the many clumps of wide green leaves hiding the beginnings of the flowers to come.
Ninety-Six Hours by Christine Dawood is published by Whitefox on 12 May. To support the Guardian, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs based on the scenario you described covering the key details background and common questions people would have
FAQs About the Titanic Submersible Incident
1 What exactly happened
A small submersible named Titan operated by OceanGate Expeditions went missing on June 18 2023 while taking five people to see the Titanic wreck The vessel lost contact with its surface support ship about 1 hour and 45 minutes into the dive After a massive international search the US Coast Guard announced that the sub had suffered a catastrophic implosion killing all five people on board
2 Who was on board the submersible
The five people were
Stockton Rush CEO and founder of OceanGate
Hamish Harding British billionaire and adventurer
PaulHenri Nargeolet French deepsea explorer and Titanic expert
Shahzada Dawood PakistaniBritish businessman
Suleman Dawood Shahzadas 19yearold son
3 How deep is the Titanic wreck and why is it dangerous to go there
The Titanic rests about 12500 feet below the surface At that depth the pressure is over 375 times greater than at sea levelroughly 6000 pounds per square inch Any flaw in the submersibles hull can cause instant collapse Its pitch black freezing cold and navigation is extremely difficult
4 Why did the submersible lose contact
The Titan used a textmessaging system and acoustic pings to communicate with the surface A loss of contact usually means the sub is too deep for signals to reach oras in this casethat a catastrophic failure occurred The implosion would have destroyed the vessel and its communication systems instantly
5 Did they have any warning before the implosion
According to official reports the support ship lost contact and the subs tracking system stopped working at the same time There were no distress signals Experts believe the implosion happened so fast that the crew would not have had time to realize what was happening
