It’s like that first day in the lifeboat together, and you just floating there, cold and wet, riding up and down each wave in that impossibly small space with the other survivors , staring at nothing in disbelief.
It’s hard to talk, let alone look at each other, and for the first few hours and most of the entire first day, no one says much of anything. What is there to say, after all? Words can’t raise a sunken ship, and from what you’ve seen, they’ve never been much good at bringing back the dead. And even if they could, what would be the point? The lifeboat’s already too small, crowded to the point that you’re shocked when you find yourself thinking that maybe it would have been better if a few of the others hadn’t been quite so lucky. Shocked more when you begin wishing they hadn’t been so lucky. Even more when the man next to you goes limp and you think nothing at all.
Your mind begins to change, taking on thoughts of its own that you keep to yourself. Frightening things. Unimaginable things. Things, however, that have been inside you all along, but that you’ve always ignored. A lifetime of looking the other way. Pretending. But now there’s no such luxury. Water everywhere you look. Water and desperate people.
It’s instinct that may have gotten you to the lifeboat, but it’s survival that keeps you in it, and it’s survival that begins to take over your mind, pushing everything useless, everything weak, far to the back of your thoughts, out of the way. Survival that opens your eyes, and on that first day in the lifeboat, survival reminds you of something you’ve known but seldom acknowledged - there is no room for weakness, just as there is no room for the dead.
So on the morning of the second day you speak, convincing the others what must be done, your job made easier by the fact that no one knows the man. Death has always been better if it’s a stranger. Letting go always easier. Hands take hold of the body and lower it into the water. The boat rises, the body sinks, and you look away.