How Should Nations Handle the Human Aftermath of Disasters?

On April 15, 1912, RMS Titanic sank. Many know the story—it was the most famous maritime disaster in history. What most people don’t know, however, is that it wasn’t until 2008 almost a century later, that a young boy—whose body was recovered from the Titanic—would be identified and his headstone given a name. His name was Sidney Leslie Goodwin.

How could it take so long to identify a victim of such a high-profile disaster? And what does it say about how we find meaning in death that we could not rest until the toddler’s correct identity was established? Because for many, this is the first step to rebuilding something meaningful from a catastrophe: taking stock of exactly what has been lost and assessing what is left.

More than 1,500 people were still aboard the Titanic when it slipped beneath the surface of the ocean. Nearby shipping raced to pick up the 705 survivors who had made it to the lifeboats prior to the ship slipping beneath the waves. It wasn’t until five days after the sinking that a cable repair ship, the CS Mackay-Bennett, arrived at the scene. It had been hastily refitted in Nova Scotia for the task of recovering bodies. In place of its cables and winches, the Mackay-Bennett now carried a priest, embalming supplies to handle seventy cadavers, one hundred coffins, and one hundred tons of ice in which to preserve recovered human remains.

Those supplies proved woefully inadequate. Over 1,500 people perished in the calamity, and the Mackay-Bennett was quickly overwhelmed. Having taken on hundreds of bodies, the ship’s captain made the decision to store only the remains of first- and second-class passengers for burial at home, and to bury the “steerage” passengers at sea. Of the 306 bodies recovered by the Mackay-Bennett, 106 were returned to the Atlantic. Burial at sea is a perfectly honorable disposition. Personally, I want my ashes to be scattered at sea when I die. But respecting the dead is all about having a choice: respecting the wishes of the dead or their families. The poor on the Titanic were not offered any choice, just like the tens of thousands of dead put into mass graves in Haiti.

Among the bodies pulled from the cold waters was that of a fair-haired, two-year-old boy. He was unidentified, and buried under a headstone paid for by distraught rescue workers at a cemetery in Newfoundland. The legend on the stone read simply: “Our babe.” While working the Swissair Flight 111 disaster, I visited the Fairview Lawn Cemetery in Halifax and saw many of the graves, including these.

There the toddler rested for almost 90 years, until the newly developed art of DNA testing allowed researchers to use genetic material to identify still unknown victims of the disaster. Several graves were reopened, although decomposition and water seepage meant that two of them now contained only mud. “Our babe” had been reduced by time to a fragment of arm bone and three milk teeth.

He was initially identified as Gösta Leonard Pålsson of Sweden, who witnesses had last seen being swept overboard as the liner slid beneath the waves. His mother’s body was recovered with the tickets for each of her four children in her pocket. However, the identification process was still relatively new. After tracking down the descendants of the Pålssons, it was proven that the boy had not, in fact, been Gösta. The DNA then indicated he might be a 13-month-old Finnish boy named Eino Viljami Panula.

This identification process went on for several years. In fact, on August 6, 2008, relatives of the Goodwin family, who were following the attempts to identify the unknown child and believed one of them was Sidney, gathered at Fairview to hold a memorial service for him, and for all the children who perished on the Titanic.

There the story could have ended, but for a pair of leather shoes. When the bodies were brought ashore in 1912, police officers were assigned to guard them. The constables were ordered to burn the victims’ clothes prior to burial, to prevent them being stolen by morbid souvenir hunters. But one of the officers could not bring himself to destroy the infant’s tiny shoes, and he kept them in his desk for years. Those shoes eventually wound up in a museum, donated by the sergeant’s grandson.

It was several years after the DNA tests had been carried out before some observant soul noticed that the shoes were actually far too big for a 13-month-old child. More DNA tests were ordered, and descendants of families of toddlers who were not recovered provided DNA samples, as the scientific method was rapidly improving, yielding ever more reliable results. Much like today, DNA is part of the identification solutions, but rarely stands alone. So Sidney Leslie Goodwin was identified, perhaps the last one of the disaster. His family could now place a name on his tombstone.

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Bodies are powerful totems, and we nurture a deep fear of them falling into the wrong hands, of being desecrated or disrespected. The tombs or houses of the dead can become even more potent: the most famous place in India, the Taj Mahal, is a mausoleum built by a ruler to his lost love. Not coincidentally, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world was also a tomb, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus in present-day Turkey, likewise a monument to a broken heart, built by Queen Artemisia for her deceased husband, King Mausolus, as well as a symbol of vast wealth.

When in the summer of 1934 John Dillinger, the legendary Depression-era bank robber, was shot dead outside a Chicago movie theater by FBI agents, passersby dipped their handkerchiefs in his blood as a macabre memento. Just a couple of months earlier, his contemporaries Bonnie and Clyde fared even worse: after they were shot dead by lawmen in rural Texas, one witness tried to hack off Clyde Barrow’s ear as a souvenir. Others cut off pieces of Bonnie Parker’s bloodstained dress and hurried away with the trophies, which were no doubt handed down through the generations to incredulous children and grandchildren.

In death, the criminal heroes of folklore inspire such behavior. Likewise, entire cathedrals have been built around the kneecap or finger of many a martyred Catholic saint, preserved as sacred artifacts and revered by generations of worshippers. Death has always added an aura of mystery to a lost life; the body fascinates even as it repels. Even Neanderthals have been found to have decorated the graves of their lost ones with shells and flowers, the ancient pollen surviving until archaeologists could exhume and identify them.

That was probably why the US government directed that the body of Osama bin Laden be buried at sea, in the Indian Ocean, after killing the Al Qaeda leader in his Pakistan hideout. It was feared that any grave would quickly become a shrine, a focal point for radicals and fanatics. I personally disagreed, although no one consulted me. I think the bodies of the dead—even those who have committed terrible crimes—should be treated in accordance with the traditions and culture they lived by. That was a belief underscored by Albert Pierrepoint, England’s last hangman who died in 1992 after executing as many as 600 people.

At the end of World War II, and for several years after, he was sent to Germany to hang two hundred Nazi war criminals—sometimes as many as ten a day—but he always insisted on treating the dead with the utmost respect, because the punishment had already been carried out on the living. The dead are no longer a threat. As I said earlier, burial at sea is perfectly respectable, but it is not a Muslim ritual. Bin Laden could have had a proper Muslim burial in an unmarked grave at a secret location.

Some nations have not always recovered their dead. Let me ask you, for example, when the first body of a British soldier killed overseas was repatriated to Great Britain? Given the British Empire’s endless foreign adventures, you might say it was sometime in the 19th century, when commercial embalming first took off.

You’d be wrong: leaving aside World War I, when the body of an unidentified soldier was recovered from the mud of Flanders and then buried in a marble tomb, The Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, at Westminster Abbey, it was shortly after the Falklands-Malvinas War in 1982, when the bodies of 64 deceased British soldiers were brought home this only after a very public outcry from family members. Before that, generations of British squaddies, colonial troops, and their officers had been interred in graves close to where they fell in battle, from Yemen to Canada to Singapore. The reason was twofold: for centuries, moving deceased was an expensive and unsanitary business, but there was a deeper, more elemental reason—since the dawn of time, bodies have been used to mark property and territory.

In the ruins of Catalhoyuk, one of the world’s earliest settlements located in what is now Turkey, archaeologists have found bodies buried inside houses, either under the floors or in raised clay platforms that their descendants used as beds, in what may have been the ultimate marker of ancestral ownership. Similarly, the war graves of the British dead seeded distant lands for Queen and Empire. Even Saddam Hussein recognized the universal taboo of the dead, so that when British troops invaded the Iraqi port of Basra in the spring of 2003, they found well-preserved marble plaques marking the resting place of thousands of their forebears who had landed on those same shores in 1915, during the First World War campaign against the Ottoman Empire.

As the World War I poet Rupert Brooke wrote in his poem “The Soldier”:

If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.

Brooke would know—he is buried on the Greek island of Skyros, after dying of sepsis, the result of an infected mosquito bite on a troop ship bound for Gallipoli. Thousands of his comrades who made it to Gallipoli and fell in the subsequent slaughter there are buried in the Lone Pine Cemetery in Turkey, close to that long-ago battlefield. Inscribed in stone are the extraordinary words of Turkey’s post–World War I leader Kemal Ataturk, expressing a universal respect for the enemy’s dead:

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives . . . You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore, rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours. You, the mothers who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.

While there is some controversy about whether those words were actually said by Ataturk, the sentiment shown in the care of the resting place and the treatment of the deceased is sincere and with meaning. Arlington National Cemetery, across the Potomac from Washington, was once the country estate of General Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Confederate states’ forces. The property was expropriated during the Civil War and thousands of the Union’s dead were buried there, in what many at the time saw as fitting payback for the commander who had rebelled against his own government—a man who lacked the moral courage to stand for what was right—and in doing so contributed to countless dead who now occupied his family estate.

Grief—the pain of not knowing what happened to our loved ones and ancestors—can echo down through generations. It can topple governments and it can start wars. It is one of the most powerful emotions on earth, yet few people talk about it openly or know how to deal with it. Throughout history, it was the purview of priests and holy men, but in an age where faith has taken a back seat to science, no one has really stepped forward to fill that vacant space. Modern death is predicated on people slowly slipping away in private, out of sight, saying their goodbyes in the hushed confines of a hospice. But when people die spectacularly, in public and in large numbers, no one quite knows how to pick up the pieces, both metaphorically and literally. That is where I step in.

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From Personal Effects by Robert A. Jensen. Used with the permission of St. Martin’s Press.