A French nun who recently celebrated her 118th birthday with her
traditional port-and-chocolate cocktail is now the world's oldest known
person, following the death announced on Monday of a Japanese woman one
year her senior.
Lucile Randon, known as Sister Andre, was born in southern France on
February 11th, 1904, when World War I was still a decade away.
She now lives at a nursing home in Toulon along the Mediterranean
coast, beginning every day with breakfast and then a morning mass,
though her eyes can no longer see.
“She’s happy, she very much likes this attention,” said the home’s
communications director David Tavella, adding that a short press
conference would be held on Tuesday morning.
“But it’s just another step, because her real goal is to overtake
Jeanne Calment,” a French woman who was reportedly 122 years-old when
she died in 1997.
This year Sister Andre got a handwritten New Year’s greeting from
President Emmanuel Macron, among the many letters and boxes of
chocolates sent by well-wishers.
“I was always admired for my wisdom and intelligence, but now people
could care less because I’m stubborn,” she jokingly told an AFP in an
interview for her 118th tour around the sun.
“I thinking of getting out of this business but they won’t let me,” she said.
She worked as a governess in Paris — a period she once called the
happiest time of her life — before taking her religious vows with the
Daughters of Charity.
Previously the person deemed the world’s oldest by the International
Database on Longevity (IDL) and Guinness World Records was Kane Tanaka,
whose death in Japan on April 19th was announced on Monday.
With her death, “Sister Andre indeed becomes the oldest, and by far,
since the next oldest is a Polish woman who is 115,” said Laurent
Toussaint, a computer scientist and amateur tracker for the IDL as well
as the French institute of demographic studies (INED).
Most centenarians are found in the world’s so-called blue zones,
where people live longer than average, such as Okinawa in Japan or on
the Italian island of Sardinia.
But France, while not considered a blue zone, nonetheless has 30,000
centenarians, according to statistics institute Insee, with around 40 of
them 110 or older.
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