Issued on: 01/18/2023 – 00:54
The world’s oldest known person, French nun Lucile Randon, has died at the age of 118, a spokesman for news agency AFP said on Tuesday.
Randon, known as Sister Andre, was born in southern France on February 11, 1904, with World War I still a decade away.
She died in her sleep at her Toulon care home, spokesman David Tavella said.
“There is great sadness, but … it was her desire to join her beloved brother. It’s a liberation for them,” Tavella, of the Sainte-Catherine-Laboure nursing home, told AFP.
The sister was long hailed as the oldest European woman before the death of Japanese Kane Tanaka at the age of 119 made her the longest-lived person on earth.
Guinness World Records officially recognized their status in April 2022.
Randon was born the year New York opened its first subway and the Tour de France was held just once.
She grew up in a Protestant family as the only girl of three brothers and lived in the South American city of Ales.
One of her fondest memories is the return of two of her brothers at the end of World War I, she told AFP in an interview on her 116th birthday.
“It was rare, in families there were usually two dead instead of two alive. They both came back,” she said.
She worked as a governess in Paris – a period she once described as the happiest of her life – for the children of wealthy families.
She converted to Catholicism and was baptized at the age of 26.
Driven by a desire to “go further”, she joined the nunnery of the Daughters of Charity at the relatively late age of 41.
Sister Andre was then assigned to a hospital in Vichy, where she worked for 31 years.
In later life she moved to Toulon on the Mediterranean coast.
Her days in the nursing home were marked by prayers, mealtimes, and visits from residents and hospice workers.
She also received a steady stream of letters, almost all of which she replied to.
In 2021, she survived contracting Covid-19, which infected 81 residents at her nursing home.
Randon told reporters last year that her work and caring for others has kept her fit.
“People say work kills, for me work kept me alive, I kept working until I was 108,” she told reporters in the home’s tea room in April last year.
Although blind and confined to a wheelchair, she used to take care of other elderly people much younger than herself.
“People should help and love each other instead of hating each other. If we shared all that, a lot would be better,” she said at the same meeting with journalists.
But the Catholic nun had turned down requests for locks of hair or DNA samples, saying “only God” knows the secret of her longevity.
It’s likely that France’s new oldest person is now 112-year-old Marie-Rose Tessier, a woman from Vendee, longevity expert Laurent Toussaint told AFP.
But Toussaint warned that it was always possible that someone even older had not yet come forward.
Jeanne Calment, who died in Arles, southern France, in 1997 at the age of 122, holds the record for the oldest confirmed human age.
(AFP)