World’s oldest known person, French nun Lucile Randon, dies at 118
Sister Andrée was born in 1904 and survived an outbreak of Covid-19 in 2021 in her nursing home that killed 10 other residents
The world’s oldest known person, French nun Lucile Randon, has died aged 118, a spokesman has said.
Randon, known as Sister Andrée, was born in southern France on 11 February 1904, when the first world war was still a decade away.
She died in her sleep at her nursing home in Toulon, spokesman David Tavella said on Tuesday.
“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-Labouré
nursing home, told AFP.
Randon was born in the year New York opened its first subway and when the Tour de France had only been staged once.
She
worked as a governor and tutor before entering a convent in 1944, aged
40. She had been in nursing homes since 1979 and in the Toulon home
since 2009.
In 2021, she survived a bout of
Covid-19 after the virus swept through the nursing home where she lived,
killing 10 other residents.
“She didn’t ask me about her health but about her
routine. She wanted to know for example if the meal and bed times were
going to change. She showed no fear of the illness, in fact she was more
worried about the other residents,” Tavella said.
Asked
if she was scared to have Covid, the nun told France’s BFM television:
“No, I wasn’t scared because I wasn’t scared to die … I’m happy to be
with you, but I would wish to be somewhere else – join my big brother
and my grandfather and my grandmother.”
In
2020, Randon told French radio she had no idea how she had lived so
long. “I’ve no idea what the secret is. Only God can answer that
question,” she said. “I’ve had plenty of unhappiness in life and during
the 1914-1918 war when I was a child, I suffered like everyone else.”
