France 24 reports that the oldest known person has died at the age of 118 and 340 days. French nun Lucie Randon, known as Sister Andre, was born in southern France on 11 Februrary 1904, and she died in her sleep at her nursing home in Toulon on 17 January 2023.
The record for the oldest person ever goes to Jeane Calment who died in 1997 in Arles, southern France at the age of 122. And in 2022, Japan’s Kane Tanka died at the age of 119, leaving Sister Andre as the oldest known person in the world. The Guinness Book of World Records officially acknowledged her status as the oldest living person in April 2022. With Lucie Randon’s death, the title of the oldest living French person is now likely to go to 112-year-old Marie-Rose Tessier, a woman from Vendee. They are all regarded as supercentenarians.
Sister Andre was the only girl among three brothers, living in a Protestant family in Ales, 40 kilometres (25 miles) from Nimes. She worked as a governess in Versailles, near Paris, looking after children, and converted to Catholicism at the age of 26. She joined the Daughters of Charity order of nuns when she was 41, and worked in a hospital in Vichy for 31 years. She moved to Toulon on the Mediterrean coast in 2009.
In 2009, she entered the Sainte-Catherine-Laboure nursing home. In 2021, she survived Covid-19, which infected 81 residents of the home.
She was blind and relied on a wheelchair, but she continued to care for other elderly people, much younger than herself. She told reporters, ‘People should help each other and love each other instead of hating. If we shared all that, things would be a lot better.’
She credits continuing to work and caring for others as the secrets to long life. ‘People say that work kills. For me, work kept me alive. I kept working until I was 108,’ she told reporters in April 2022. She rejected donating locks of her hair for DNA analysis, saying that, ‘only the good Lord knows’ the secret of her longevity.
MARTINA NICOLLS
SUBSCRIBE TO MARTINA NICOLLS FOR NEWS AND UPDATES
MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
Comments
Post a Comment