I thought about him every minute of every hour of every day for five years. I couldn't bring myself to move from those icy black waters where he had disappeared. Where I had left him. It wasn't guilt about leaving him behind and it wasn't just grief over his death. It was that I hadn't tried harder to save him. I hadn't tried at all to save him. He had given his life so that I could have mine.
I guess it was that I could never pay him back for that. It was that he was the only man that I knew I would ever be wholly and unconditionally in love with. I had been so ridiculously lucky to find that once, I was smart enough to know that I would never find that again in my life. I had known him for a week. One week.
I'm not going to use words like moved on or put the past in the past. I never not ever forgot about him, about what had happened on April 12, those decades ago. But those memories become just that. Memories. They became who I was.
You know how when you wake up in the morning and you just innately know, I'm me, my birthday is this date, my family are these people. That was how it became with me. I'm Rose, my birthday is September 1, my family is my husband, my three children, and my grandchildren. I was on the Titanic. I fell in love with a man named Jack Dawson. He died. I didn't. No one has to remind you, the knowledge is just there. I stopped hating myself for it. I stopped wanting to die because I failed to see the point in living.
I'm not sure when I snapped out of it, but one day I woke up and a voice in my head piped up. Stop it, Rose. STOP IT! He died so you could live, so live for him! And I did. I did things every day that he would have appreciated. I rode a horse on the beach in California, sitting the way a man would. I got my pilot's license, I acted for a bit. I did something adventurous every day, something that Jack I'm sure was laughing about wherever he was, and shaking his head at me.
He saved me. In every way a person can be saved. The pain will never dull, not the way it does for some. For me, every day it is new and raw. But every day, the remembrance is accompanied by the remembrance of his laughter, by the flash of his blue eyes. And I go out my front door and I live for him.