Tuesday, January 17, 2023 | 11:00 p.m.
The French nun Sister André, recognized since April as the world’s longest-lived person, died Tuesday morning at her nursing home in Toulon, located on the Mediterranean coast of southern France, at the age of 118.
“He passed away at two in the morning,” while he was sleeping, an official said when reporting the death of Lucile Randon, known as Sister André, born on February 11, 1904 in the southern French city of Alés.
The title of oldest person in the world is not attributed by any official body, but specialists agreed that the nun was the oldest person whose marital status could be verified.
Thus, the Guinness Book of Records conferred that rank on April 25, 2022, after the death, at the age of 119, of the Japanese Kane Tanaka.
Sister André, in the last stretch of her life blind and in a wheelchair, did not hide a certain tiredness and confessed that her wish was to “die soon”, added AFP.
But “God doesn’t listen to me, he must be deaf,” said the woman in an interview in February of last year.
“I’m happy to be with you, but I wish I were somewhere else: with my older brother, my grandfather, and my grandmother,” he opened up in 2021, when he managed to overcome the coronavirus after going through the disease in isolation and without symptoms.
Born into a non-practicing Protestant family, the nun took the habit late, in the congregation of the Daughters of Charity, and worked until the late 1970s.
Later, she continued to take care of other retirees, younger than her.
“It is said that work kills, but for me it is work that makes me live, since I worked until I was 108 years old,” Sister André had expressed in one of her last appearances.
