Perhaps New Yorkers will gather some day soon at the allegorical statue of “Memory,” in the park named for Isador and Ida Straus. They founded Macy’s and saw great triumphs, but he went down on the Titanic, and Ida chose to stay with him. No less a muse than Audrey Munson posed for “Memory.” Now the husband of their great-great granddaughter just perished on the Titan, which foundered in the same depths.

That relation, Stockton Rush, the chief executive officer of OceanGate, which owned the Titan, is now believed lost along with four other passengers: Shahzada Dawood, Sulaiman Dawood, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henry Nargeolet. Their destination was the wreckage of the doomed ocean liner RMS Titanic. Instead, the Coast Guard found newer debris “consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel.” 

The Titan, a submersible, lost contact with a chartered ship on Sunday, midway on its journey down to the Titanic, about 1,600 feet from the doomed vessel’s bow. The submersible had oxygen enough for four days, but the wreckage suggests that the vessel imploded on its way down to distant marine realms. Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard, noted that “This is an incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the floor.”

A voyage aboard the Titan cost some $250,000. Aboard was an eclectic crew. A veteran French seamen, a man with several Guinness World Records to his name, a billionaire. Also, Rush and a 19-year-old. Some in the corners of the internet are arguing that the passengers’ privilege somehow lessens the tragedy of their loss. Why? It would be like saying the Titanic is not worth empathy because John Jacob Astor IV was on board.

The director of “Titanic,” James Cameron, himself a submersible designer as well as a movie maestro, tells ABC News that “I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field.” Hubris and tragedy have been bedfellows all the way back to the Greeks, who gave us their word “Titan,” for the race overthrown by Zeus. 

Two passengers aboard the Titan, Harding and Nargeolet, were members of New York’s Explorers Club, headquartered at the Upper East Side. Its honorary members have included the astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary, and the Rough Rider himself, President Theodore Roosevelt. The Titan shared their spirit. Let them all be remembered for the example of their courage and their zest for life.