A decommissioned ship is a sad thing really. With no crew it is just a floating ornate metal box, a ghost town with no life.
I once saw a book in a bookstore and paged through it...it was a book of photographs of US Navy ships that were being broken up for scrap.
It saddened me in a way that I am sure many people would find puzzling, but there was one picture that really hit me in a way that kind of made me understand why I felt that way.
It was a WWII heavy cruiser, and the entire bow had been sawed right off from about the second current forward.
Looking at it was like looking at the face of a woman that has been disfigured in some way, almost as if it would look if her nose was simply removed from her face, and a gaping hole was left there.
I have never been able to find that book, and I have looked.
I feel that an inanimate object like a warship does acquire something from the thousands of sailors who pass through her. But I also know that special “something” doesn’t exist in HER, per se, but does palpably exist in the minds and hearts of those sailors.
So, it does exist.