Daily Times

The world’s oldest known person, French nun Lucile Randon, died on Tuesday at the age of 118, according to an AFP spokesman.

Randon, also known as Sister Andre, was born in southern France on February 11, 1904, a decade before World War I.

According to spokesman David Tavella, she died in her sleep at her nursing home in Toulon.

“There is a great deal of sadness, but it was her desire to be with her beloved brother. It’s a liberation for her “Tavella, a nurse at the Sainte-Catherine-Laboure nursing home, spoke to AFP.

The sister was long regarded as the oldest European, but the death of Japan’s Kane Tanaka at the age of 119 last year made her the world’s oldest person.

Guinness World Records officially acknowledged her status in April 2022.

Randon was born in the year New York opened its first subway and when the Tour de France had only been staged once.

She grew up in a Protestant family as the only girl among three brothers, living in the southern town of Ales.

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.

“It was rare, in families, there were usually two dead rather than two alive. They both came back,” she said.

She worked as a governess in Paris — a period she once called the happiest time of her life — for the children of wealthy families.

She converted to Catholicism and was baptized at the age of 26.

Driven by a desire to “go further”, she joined the Daughters of Charity order of nuns at the relatively late age of 41.

Sister Andre was then assigned to a hospital in Vichy, where she worked for 31 years.

In later life she moved to Toulon along the Mediterranean coast.

Her days in the nursing home were punctuated by prayer, mealtimes, and visits from residents and hospice workers.

She also received a steady flow of letters, almost all of which she responded to.

In 2021 she survived catching Covid-19, which infected 81 residents of her nursing home.

– ‘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 relied on 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.

However, the Catholic nun refused requests for hair or DNA samples, claiming that “only the good Lord knows” the secret to her longevity.

According to longevity expert Laurent Toussaint, the new oldest person in France is likely to be 112-year-old Marie-Rose Tessier of Vendee.

However, Toussaint cautioned that it was always possible that an even older person had not yet made their presence known.

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