Mallika Dureja
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118-year-old French nun Lucile Randon died.Sister Andre, Randon, was born in southern France on February 11, 1904, a decade before World War I.Spokesman David Tavella said she died in her Toulon nursing home sleep.
“There is immense pain but… it was her desire to join her dear brother. Mr. Tavella of the Sainte-Catherine-Laboure care home told AFP that it liberates her. Before Kane Tanaka, 119, died last year, the sister was the oldest European. April 2022 saw Guinness World Records recognise her.
Randon was born in New York’s first subway year and the Tour de France’s first. In southern Ales, she was the lone girl in a Protestant family with three males. In an AFP interview on her 116th birthday, she said the return of two of her brothers after World War I was one of her best recollections.
Guinness World Records is saddened to learn of the passing of the world's oldest person, Sister André (b. Lucile Randon) at the age of 118.https://t.co/xbgvOrqK1u
— Guinness World Records (@GWR) January 18, 2023
In an AFP interview on her 116th birthday, she said the return of two of her brothers after World War I was one of her best recollections. “In families, two deceased were more common than two alive. “They both returned,” she added. Paris was her happiest time as a nanny for wealthy families’ children. At 26, she was baptised Catholic. At 41, she joined the Daughters of Charity nunnery to “go further.”
Sister Andre spent 31 years in a Vichy hospital. She retired to Mediterranean Toulon. Prayer, meals, and hospice and resident visits filled her nursing home days.She answered most of her letters.
She survived Covid-19, which infected 81 nursing home inmates in 2021.Work saved me. Last year, Randon told reporters that caring for others kept her healthy. “People say work kills, for me it kept me alive, I kept working till I was 108,” she told reporters in the home’s tearoom last April.
Although blind and wheelchair-bound, she cared for younger elderly people.Instead of hate, people should help and love. She told media that sharing all that will improve things.
The Catholic nun refused hair or DNA samples, saying “only the good Lord knows” her lifespan. Longevity researcher Laurent Toussaint told AFP that Vendee’s 112-year-old Marie-Rose Tessier may be France’s new oldest person.
Toussaint cautioned that an even elder individual could still be hiding.The oldest human, 122-year-old Jeanne Calment, died in Arles, southern France, in 1997.
