From on top of an upside down lifeboat, he witnessed the Titanic sink.
At first it was quiet. Then the cries began. Soon it became “one long
continuous wailing chant, from the fifteen hundred in the water all
around us.” The cries faded away. The other lifeboats didn't return.
That was "the most heartrending part of the whole tragedy.”

In 1945, at the age of 51, Jack Thayer committed suicide
after his son was killed in World War II.