AFP – French nun Lucile Randon, the world’s oldest known person, has died at the age of 118, a spokesman told AFP on Tuesday.
Randon, better known as Sister Andre, was born in southern France on February 11, 1904, when World War I was still a decade away.
Spokesman David Tavella said he died in his sleep at his nursing home in Toulon.
“Very sad but… it was her wish to meet her dear brother. For her, it’s a salvation,” Tavella of the Sainte-Catherine-Labor nursing home told AFP.
The sister was long held as the oldest European before Japan’s Ken Tanaka died last year at the age of 119, making her the longest-living person on Earth.
Guinness World Records officially acknowledged her status in April 2022.
Randon was born the year New York opened its first subway and when the Tour de France was staged only once.
She grew up in a Protestant family as the only girl among three brothers living in the southern city of Alsace.
He told AFP in an interview on his 116th birthday that the return of his two brothers at the end of World War I was one of his fondest memories.
“It was rare, in families, there were usually two dead instead of two alive. They both came back,” she said.
She worked as a governess in Paris – a time she once called the happiest 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 “move on”, she joined the Daughters of Charity order of nuns at the relatively young age of 41.
Sister Andre was then assigned to a hospital in Vichy, where she worked for 31 years.
Later in life, she moved to Toulon along the Mediterranean coast.
Her days at the nursing home were punctuated by prayers, meal times, and visits from residents and hospice staff.
He also received a steady stream of letters, almost all of which he replied to.
In 2021 she survived COVID-19, which infected 81 residents of her nursing home.
Randon told reporters last year that his work and caring for others had kept him grounded.
“People say work kills. For me. Work kept me alive. I kept working till I was 108,” she told reporters in the tea room at home in April last year.
Although she was blind and dependent on a wheelchair, she took care of other elders much younger than herself.
“People should help each other and love each other instead of hating. If we share all that, things will be much better,” she said in the same meeting with reporters.
But the Catholic nun had rejected requests for a lock of hair or a DNA sample, saying “only the good Lord knows” the secret of her longevity.
Longevity expert Laurent Toussaint told AFP it was likely France’s new oldest person is now 112-year-old Marie-Rose Tessier, a woman from the Vendee.
But Toussaint cautioned that it was always possible that a larger one had not yet revealed itself.
Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 in Arles, southern France, at the age of 122, holds the record for the oldest confirmed age by any human.
