MARSEILLE: The oldest person in the world, French nun Lucile Randon, has died aged 118, a spokesperson told AFP on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Randon, known as Sister Andre, was born in southern France on February 11, 1904, when World War I was still a decade away.
\nShe died in her sleep at her nursing home in Toulon, spokesman David Tavella said.<\/p>\n
“There is great sadness but… it was her desire to join her beloved brother. For her, it’s a liberation,” Tavella, of the Sainte-Catherine-Laboure nursing home, told AFP.<\/p>\n
The sister was long-feted as the oldest European, before the death of Japan’s Kane Tanaka aged 119 last year left her the longest-lived person on Earth.<\/p>\n
Guinness World Records officially acknowledged her status in April 2022.<\/p>\n
Randon was born in the year New York opened its first subway and when the Tour de France had only been staged once.<\/p>\n
She grew up in a Protestant family as the only girl among three brothers, living in the southern town of Ales.<\/p>\n
One of her fondest memories was the return of two of her brothers at the end of World War I, she told AFP in an interview on her 116th birthday.<\/p>\n
“It was rare, in families, there were usually two dead rather than two alive. They both came back,” she said.<\/p>\n
She worked as a governess in Paris \u2014 a period she once called the happiest time of her life \u2014 for the children of wealthy families.<\/p>\n
She converted to Catholicism and was baptised at the age of 26.<\/p>\n
Driven by a desire to “go further”, she joined the Daughters of Charity order of nuns at the relatively late age of 41.<\/p>\n
Sister Andre was then assigned to a hospital in Vichy, where she worked for 31 years.<\/p>\n
In later life, she moved to Toulon along the Mediterranean coast.<\/p>\n
Her days in the nursing home were punctuated by prayer, mealtimes and visits from residents and hospice workers.<\/p>\n
She also received a steady flow of letters, almost all of which she responded to.<\/p>\n
In 2021 she survived catching COVID-19, which infected 81 residents of her nursing home.<\/p>\n
‘Work kept me alive’
\nRandon told reporters last year that her work and caring for others had kept her spry.<\/p>\n
“People say that work kills, for me work kept me alive, I kept working until I was 108,” she told reporters in April last year in the tearoom of the home.<\/p>\n
Although she was blind and relied on a wheelchair, she used to care for other elderly people much younger than herself.<\/p>\n
“People should help each other and love each other instead of hating. If we shared all that, things would be a lot better,” she said at the same meeting with journalists.<\/p>\n
But the Catholic nun had rejected requests for locks of hair or DNA samples, saying that “only the good Lord knows” the secret of her longevity.<\/p>\n
It is 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.<\/p>\n
But Toussaint warned that it was always possible an even older person had not yet made themselves known.<\/p>\n
Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 in Arles, southern France, at the age of 122 holds the record for the oldest confirmed age reached by any human.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
MARSEILLE: The oldest person in the world, French nun Lucile Randon, has died aged 118, a spokesperson told AFP on Tuesday. Randon, known as Sister Andre, was born in southern France on February 11, 1904, when World War I was still a decade away. She died in her sleep at her nursing home in Toulon, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":112088,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-112087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-national"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=112087"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112087\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":112089,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112087\/revisions\/112089"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/112088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=112087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=112087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=112087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}