## The Specific Gratitude and Its Weight
Okene’s reported gratitude for his survival is intertwined, in his accounts, with the guilt and the grief. These are not separate emotional states that alternate; they co-exist, as they do for many survivors of events in which other people died.
The gratitude is real. He is alive. He has a career that he has built around the confrontation of what nearly killed him. He has given interviews, maintained a public presence, and by his own account has found a way to live in the world after an experience that could have remained permanently debilitating.
The guilt is also real. The question he asks God every week — “Why only me? Why did my colleagues have to die?” — is not a question that diminishes with time in any simple way. It may become more bearable. It does not become answerable. The eleven men who died in the same event, in the same early-morning hours, on the same vessel, in the same dark water, did not survive because the conditions that preserved one air pocket in one bathroom were not present in the cabins where they slept. The physics does not distribute itself according to who deserves to live and who deserves to die.
The weight of being the person for whom the conditions happened to be right is not lightened by understanding the physics. The physics explains how. It does not address why. For someone whose primary framework for understanding the world is theological rather than physical, the “why” question points toward God. And God, in Okene’s experience, has not given a satisfying answer.