WORLD’S OLDEST PERSON SISTER ANDRE DIES AT 118

Wed 18 January 2023:

French nun Lucile Randon, the world’s oldest person, passed away at the age of 118.

At the nursing home where she resided, Randon passed away on Tuesday while sleeping. When she became a nun in 1944, she adopted the name Sister Andre.

“There is great sadness but … it was her desire to join her beloved brother. For her, it’s a liberation,” spokesperson David Tavella, of the Sainte-Catherine-Laboure nursing home in the southern French town of Toulon, told media.

Born Lucile Randon on February 11, 1904, she took the name Sister Andre when she joined a Catholic charitable order in 1944. She even survived COVID-19 in January 2021 after testing positive for the virus a month before her 117th birthday.

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

Before becoming a catholic nun, she used to take care of children during World War II and later spent 28 years caring for orphans and elderly people at a hospital.

On her 118th birthday in February last year, the beloved nun received a birthday note from French President Emmanuel Macron. Notably, Macron is the 18th French president to lead in her lifetime. She has had ten different Popes hold the reins of the Vatican since her birth.

Sister Andre was the world’s oldest living person according to the Gerontology Research Group’s (GRG) World Supercentenarian Rankings List.

WORLD’S OLDEST PERSON DIES AT 119 IN JAPAN

‘Work kept me alive’

Randon told reporters last year that her work and caring for others had kept her spry.

“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.

Although she was blind and needed a wheelchair, she used to care for other elderly people much younger than herself.

“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.

Sœur André, née Lucile Randon vient d’être désignée, cette semaine, nouvelle doyenne de l’humanité. Âgée de 118 ans, elle succède à la Japonaise Kane Tanaka, décédée à l’âge de 119 ans. Portrait. pic.twitter.com/cPivFgQDTG

— INA.fr (@Inafr_officiel) April 27, 2022

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.

But Toussaint warned that it was always possible an even older person had not yet made themselves known.

Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 at the age of 122 in Arles, southern France, holds the record for the oldest confirmed age reached by any human.

She became the world’s oldest person alive after Kane Tanaka, a Japanese woman, died at the age of 119 on April 19, 2022. Following her death, 115-year-old María Branyas Morera, an American-born Spanish supercentenarian, has become the world’s oldest living person.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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