Nothing screams middle-aged quite like a discussion about the Fair Deal nursing home scheme over breakfast. It was the annual get together of college friends and up to this the breakfast chat had been full of salacious gossip, exotic travel plans and romantic entanglements. Now we were mulling over the care of elderly parents and wondering how power of attorney worked.
To avoid old age hurtling towards us, perhaps we should take a leaf out of Elizabeth Carson’s book. The Belfast woman, born Elizabeth Newell, sidestepped the nursing home debate entirely by changing her address to somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean.
It all began in 1864 when her husband, Samuel, died. She decided to embark on her first ocean trip and made a voyage across the Atlantic Ocean with her daughter to visit her brother in Tennessee. William B Newell had done very well for himself and he was a millionaire, living in Nashville.
She took his advice to remain in the US, and when he died, he left her $500,000 – a sum that would be worth almost $12 million today. Soon after, Mrs Carson dipped her toe into the water as a solo traveller and took a trip back to Belfast, leaving her daughter with friends. From then on, there was no stopping her and it is estimated that she crossed the ocean about 250 times.
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When her daughter married Chicago man Julius Rohrbach in 1883, she stepped up the travel and spent her entire time at sea. Cunard’s Lucania cruise ship became her vessel of choice and she became a minor celebrity to the crew and regular passengers. She dined with the hoi polloi, including the Vanderbilts and the Astors, and she was befriended by the soprano Adelina Patti, who presented her with a bouquet of her home-grown roses.
At some point, Elizabeth Carson’s daughter and son-in-law became alarmed at the rate at which their expected inheritance was diminishing. When she visited them in Chicago in the early 1890s, Julius Rohrbach petitioned the court to have a guardian appointed to curb her spending. He told the court she had already spent $250,000, and if she was not stopped, she would spend her entire fortune.
The redoubtable Mrs Carson was not for turning. She threatened to cut her son-in-law off if he continued with this nonsense and returned to her floating home.
She contracted pneumonia on her last trip across the ocean in December 1896 and died in Anamosa, Iowa five weeks later, aged 74. We know all this thanks to reports from the Chicago Tribune, which Cunard’s historians helpfully shared with me. They show that her death was front page news for the newspaper in January 1897. It reported that the Lucania’s flag would be flown at half-mast on its next voyage, in memory of this “remarkable woman”.
The newspaper went into great detail about her final moments, perhaps getting carried away with the drama of the occasion. “She talked softly of the mingling of the red rays with the deep green of the waves,” it wrote. “Suddenly she raised halfway up on her elbow and with a bright smile cried: ‘The sea! The sea!’ She then fell back on her pillow and her spirit was received into the bosom of the infinite, of which the sea is the universal symbol.”
And so ended the life of the intriguing Elizabeth Carson. But there’s more. After her death, her much anticipated will was revealed. It emerged that shortly after her son-in-law took that ill-fated court case, she travelled to Belfast and made a will, bequeathing just $1,000 to her daughter. Some $200,000 was left to the crew of the Lucania, $50,000 of which was earmarked for the ship’s captain.
You’d have to agree that the Belfast woman was ahead of her time. What better place to see out your final years than on a cruise ship? You have a range of medical services at your disposal. You can eat as healthily or unhealthily as you wish. You can swim every day and dance every night. And if you don’t like your next-door neighbour, don’t worry. They’ll be gone in a week.
Our nursing homes cannot cope with the demand so here’s a modest proposal for the Department of Finance mandarins who are busy totting up the figures for the budget: extend the Fair Deal scheme to include cruise ships.
What would you prefer? Using the collateral of your home to fund a stay in a nursing home where the most exciting event involves someone dropping a knitting needle when they doze off? Or drinking Mimosas for breakfast on a sunlit deck?
I rest my case.