Woman who lost son and husband in Titan Sub incident recalls how she received their remains

A woman whose husband and son died in the Titan sub disaster has opened up about her grief, detailing how it took nine months for her family to receive their remains.

Businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his son Suleman, 19, were two of the five people onboard the OceanGate submarine, which imploded in June 2023 on its way to visit the Titanic wreckage in the North Atlantic Ocean.

According to the teenager’s mother, Christine Dawood, she still goes into her deceased child’s bedroom to this day, opting to sit on his bed and letting the ‘grief come’.

“After a while, I can put the grief away until the next time it gets too much,” she claimed in a new interview with The Guardian.

“I've worked a lot on my grief for Suleman, but I'm only now starting to grieve for my husband. Publicly, they are always put together, but they are two different relationships. Two very different pains.”

Suleman Dawood and his father were one of the two men who died in the OceanGate submarine disaster (Youtube/@lorraine)

Christine, who also has a 20-year-old daughter, said that the US Coast Guard eventually got in touch with her to deliver her spouse's and her son’s remains.

Despite meticulous testing, the officials were only able to confirm that a very small amount of DNA left after the wreckage was from the father and son.

“We didn't get the bodies for nine months. Well, when I say bodies, I mean the slush that was left. They came in two small boxes, like shoeboxes.

“There wasn't much they could find. They have a big pile they can't separate, all mixed DNA, and they asked if I wanted some of that, too. But I said no, just what you know is Suleman and Shahzada,” the grieving woman lamented.

Elsewhere in the interview, the British widow recalled her last encounter with her family.

Christine Dawood received her family's remains in a 'shoebox' (YouTube/@lorraine)

“Suleman had his Rubik’s Cube, because he was planning to get the record for solving it at the deepest depth ever. And we were giggling, because Shahzada is clumsy and when he was going down the stairs he was wobbling a bit. I waved. And that was it. They got into a dinghy and sped off. It went very fast, the goodbye.”

She was later informed that the sub had lost communications, remarking that if OceanGate staff hadn’t kept hope alive, then she would’ve ‘deteriorated’ much quicker than she did.

Last year, the Coast Guard wrote in a post that the Titan submersible implosion had been a ‘preventable tragedy’.

Officials laid the blame at OceanGate’s door for its culture of avoiding regulation and ‘negligence’ of safety.

In 2025, Mark Monroe directed a Netflix documentary titled Titan: The OceanGate Disaster.

The 111-minute film dived into the deep-sea journey that quickly became a tragedy, featuring the warnings that American businessman and OceanGate co-founder Stockton Rush ignored.

A Netflix documentary about the tragedy can be streamed now (Netflix)

“When the Titan submersible went missing, I was horrified and mesmerised by the 24/7 news coverage and global social commentary — just like the rest of the world,” Monroe told Tudum last year.

“There was no context for what could have happened to those onboard, and the only touchpoint was the Titanic, a story that’s now become a grim fairy tale.

“The more I dug into this terrible tragedy, the more intrigued I became about how this could have ever happened in the first place, and who exactly was the man who built and then went down with this ship. We hope that this film can help provide answers to these very questions.”

Titan: The OceanGate Disaster is available to stream now.