My sister is a 5-foot, 2-inch walking encyclopedia of all things Titanic.

She was about 6 when the obsession started. She was 8 when Dr. Robert Ballard discovered the wreck. That was when she began to carry around a coffee table book that was almost as tall as she was. She highlighted portions of it like she was researching a dissertation. At 9, she was a kind of savant, brimming with facts. Want to know how far down the ship rests? Who held the wheel when it hit the iceberg? The number of stokers in the engine room? She knew.

She still does. Decades later, her living room is decorated with Titanic art. Her bookshelves are filled with Titanic books. I’m not saying she named her children after people on the Titanic, but I am saying there were people with each of her children’s names on the Titanic. Decide for yourself.

So you can believe that she has feelings about the Titan submersible implosion. I have heard about those feelings a lot. Chiefly, she is appalled at the blatant disrespect of turning the final resting place of 1,517 people into a theme park attraction for those with more wealth than good sense.

And, because of that, she is not particularly upset with the videos and memes swamping social media, mocking the disaster. She is flooding my inbox forwarding them.

Yes, five people died, adding to the body count at that fateful pinpoint on the globe. But does that mean that we automatically owe solemnity to the passing? There is division on that point.

For some, it’s an exercise in bad taste, dancing on the graves of people who will not even have a decent burial. That’s certainly a reasonable position, especially for the four passengers who had no part in the design and operation of the uncertified, experimental watercraft.

But, for others, it has a kind of uniting feel. The exorbitant cost of the journey, the utter hubris of the technology, the rapid response and fast recovery all speak of something that seems in even more bad taste: that the whims of the uber-rich are worth more than the lives of regular people, much less the impoverished.

It was poignantly demonstrated by the fact that, as the world watched the futile search for the OceanGate Titan and its billionaire passengers, more than 600 of an estimated 750 mainly Syrian refugees were drowning in a shipwreck off the coast of Greece. It was a fishing trawler with no first class. There were no $250,000 tickets to see something extraordinary, just a desperate attempt to reach safety by paying whatever was necessary.

It is a lesson that my sister has known since she was in second grade, when she could tell you that there were 709 third-class passengers packed into the Titanic’s lowest berths. Albert Edward Peacock was just 7 months old when he died with his family, like 76% of the poorest ticket holders. Only 39% of the richest aboard died.

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