Christine Dawood still can’t quite believe that her husband of 20 years, Shahzada, and their precious son, Suleman, are no longer with her. It is now seven months since she last saw them climbing into the Titan submersible for, what she calls, ‘the big one’ in terms of this remarkable family’s many adventures.
Last June, one hour and 45 minutes into the dive in the North Atlantic to view the wreck of the Titanic, off the coast of Newfoundland, the Titan lost communication with its support ship, the Polar Prince.
For four days, Christine and her daughter, Alina, who was then 17, waited aboard that ship for businessman and philanthropist Shahzada, 48, and 19-year-old Suleman to return to the surface.
They never did. Instead, they died on their ill-fated adventure with three other crew members, including Stockton Rush, the CEO of Titan owner OceanGate. ‘The moment we knew they’d found debris and there were no survivors, Alina and I went on deck. Until that moment we’d had hope. We took some cushions with us and just sat there looking out at the ocean. We were both crying.
‘I turned to her and said: ‘I’m a widow now.’ She said: ‘Yes, and I’m a single child.’ Then we cried even more.
‘Apart from a few business trips when Shahzada would go back to [his native] Pakistan, we did everything together.
‘It’s the waking up every morning that’s . . . sometimes I still don’t believe it. The possibility of it [Titan] imploding never crossed our minds. To lose a husband is terrible, but when you lose a child…’
She leans back and stares up at the ceiling.
‘My son was an emergency C-section. I almost lost him. I just thought he was this angel who was gifted to me,’ she says. ‘Without modern medicine I would not have had him. He was an old soul – a people’s person who made everyone feel special.
‘I love being a mother. I have Alina, but I never wanted to be a single mother to an only child.
‘No parent should have to grieve for their child. It’s unnatural. All of a sudden your purpose, your identity, is ripped away from you.’
She looks at me with eyes that swim with sadness.
On Monday it would have been Suleman’s 20th birthday. Christine has ordered some balloons because her son was ‘always happy’ when she bought them for him.
This year, though, there will be ‘no Happy Birthday printed on the balloons — no name or numbers’, she says. They will simply be filled with helium and allowed to float up into the glass atrium roof.
She’ll mark her son’s birthday remembering him and his father. She wants the world to remember them, too.
It is why she has decided to give her first in-depth interview since the tragedy. In those first days after the Titan imploded, Christine spoke briefly about her husband and son, but her grief was too raw to talk at length.
Today, the grief remains, of course, but somehow she can find traces of humour, too.
This warm family home in Surrey once rang with laughter. Her husband and daughter were, she tells me, two of a kind with huge brains and the ability to see ‘the big picture’, whereas she and Suleman were practical, solution-orientated souls.
She and her beloved son adored animals and would take their gentle Burmese mountain dog, Stig, on long walks together in the Surrey Hills, when they’d talk ‘about anything and everything. He was one of the kindest people I’ve ever met, which with him being a teenager says a lot’.
Christine adds: ‘He was very aware of the opportunities that his privilege gave him. In 2019 we took our children to Greenland because that’s where the iceberg that sank the Titanic came from.’
She rolls her eyes in mock exasperation. It is warming to see her humour as she remembers happier times.
‘My husband kept telling the children they were very privileged to see the glaciers. He said that in another five to ten years the place would have changed because of global warming. Suleman really took it to heart. He kept telling everyone that was a life-changing moment for him.
‘He became more conscious about the environment and wanted to make a difference. He was passionate about wealth inequality and wanted to work towards a world where distribution of wealth was more balanced. I want the world to remember him like that.’
Suleman, she tells me, was a ‘very affectionate son’ who was never too embarrassed to return his mother’s kisses. When she dreams about him, as she often does, she still feels his hugs.
‘We don’t have graves for them,’ she says. ‘There were no bodies, but recently we [she, Alina and Shahzada’s younger sister, Sabrina] went to Singapore. The sea was warm enough for us to walk in and I truly felt them around me. I thought: ‘This is such a gift. I don’t need a grave because every time I am in the ocean I will be able to connect with them because they are part of it.’
‘We stood there with our skirts draped over our arms and cried for ten minutes straight. It was very, very cathartic. When I think of them now, they are just asleep down there [in the ocean].’
Suleman was at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, studying business analysis and human resources and intending to work with his father in the family business, when they boarded the Polar Prince to visit the wreck of the Titanic in the Titan submersible. They had been planning the trip since before Covid.
‘We’d started talking about it in 2018,’ says Christine. ‘I was supposed to go with my husband but, because of the delay with Covid, Suleman turned 18 and he wanted to go.’
Again, there is a flash of humour as she explains. ‘The idea of being in a small submersible going down and then up for eight hours was not necessarily my favourite thought.
‘I get bored on flights when you can at least watch movies. What do you do under the ocean going down for four hours in complete darkness? I mean, there’s only so much you can talk about to a person.’
For all their adventures the Dawoods were, she says, ‘not risk-taking types. We would not jump off bridges or out of planes. This [Titan] was out of our comfort zone. The Polar Prince was a rescue ship that had been retired, and I was very seasick.’
She falls silent for a moment. ‘I hardly interacted with them [the night before] because I was throwing up so much. I went to bed pretty early.’ The following morning, her husband was so excited, she says, he was ‘literally glowing’.
Her son was thrilled, too, to be sharing this experience with his father. He’d 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.
Christine remembers Shahzada looking ‘a bit like a swan out of water’ as he stumbled about climbing into Titan. ‘He was not elegant, but he was adorable,’ she says.
Suleman was wearing his favourite red hoodie. ‘He lived in it,’ Christine remembers fondly. ‘He wore it everywhere, even in the height of summer.
‘In hindsight would I have wanted them not to go? Absolutely — but I can’t really say I would have denied them an opportunity like that. If they had come back up and nothing had happened, it would have been quite a different story to tell.’
Christine is an extraordinary woman. She says: ‘I am widowed and I lost a child and I’m not even 50. I’m 48.’ But this is stated as a fact without self-pity.
She tells me that she grew up in the Alps near Munich, where the weather could change within an hour. ‘You learn to accept there are some things beyond your control,’ she says. ‘If the snow’s suddenly coming in, you can’t change that from stubborn will. You have to accept it, live with it and adapt. I think that’s helping me now.’
Shahzada wasn’t just Christine’s husband but her best friend. They met at Reutlingen University in her native Germany. The son of a prominent Pakistani family, he was, she says, ‘very different to anyone I’d known. He was the opposite of the blond, blue-eyed Germans. But I guess opposites attract.
‘I saw a kindred spirit because our values were the same. Honesty was a big one. Being respectful of a higher power was also really important. As well as curiosity. We loved learning together.’ Christine converted to Islam and, despite studying engineering, happily gave up her career to raise her children. ‘I thought it was really important to give them the right values, especially in a fast world like ours,’ she says.
‘Because I was a stay-at-home mum I was also a supportive wife. When, all of sudden, that is ripped away from you . . .’ She doesn’t finish the sentence. There is no need. The huge loss she has suffered is everywhere.
The house is full of joyful family photographs: Suleman as a baby; Shahzada with Margaret Thatcher at his graduation from Buckingham University; her children with their cousins on a tractor on the family farm in Lahore.
I wonder if she feels anger towards OceanGate. After all, experts have since claimed CEO Stockton Rush ignored warnings that his vessel was unsafe.
‘That’s what you’d call complicated,’ she says. ‘There were a lot of people who showed us support during that time. So, anger at OceanGate? I don’t know. But Stockton is not my favourite person in this mess.’
She adds: ‘It’s difficult because we don’t know exactly what happened as the investigation is on-going. But I do feel angry.
‘After the tragedy we couldn’t come back home until October because we’d started renovating the house. We were staying with my in-laws, but eventually I said: ‘We need the workers out of the house. I need my space . . . my sanity.’
‘It was dark [when we returned]. I tried to switch on the light and the fuse blew. I lost it and swore at the whole world because I felt so alone. I thought: ‘It’s just me now. I am the only adult in the house.’ ‘
Christine stops to offer me another cup of coffee. ‘I guess there’s still a lot to be grateful for,’ she says. ‘I love going out into the forest. I love nature and I have a lot of people around me who support me. I have a lot of love in my life — a lot of friendships.
‘But I still can’t go into Suleman’s room. When the builders came in we packed up his room. His things are still in boxes I’ve never unpacked. I can’t.’
She tries to muster a smile. ‘Now 2024 is starting, who knows? 2023 was like this black hole, darkness . . . With the new year, maybe we can bring some light into the dark,’ she muses.
‘How that’s going to look? I don’t know yet.’
Emily Foster is a globe-trotting journalist based in the UK. Her articles offer readers a global perspective on international events, exploring complex geopolitical issues and providing a nuanced view of the world’s most pressing challenges.
