Considered the oldest person in the world, the French nun Lucile Randon, who as a religious took the name of Sister Andrée, died this Tuesday (17), according to a spokesperson. Born February 11, 1904, she was 118 years old.
She became the oldest person on the planet after the death of Kane Tanaka in April last year. The Japanese woman was 119 years old at the time. Also in 2022, but in January, the Spaniard Saturnino de la Fuente García, considered the oldest man in the world, died just before his 113th birthday.
The oldest living person verified by Guinness, the book of records, was Frenchwoman Jeanne Louise Calment, who died aged 122 years and 164 days in 1997.
Sister Andrée’s story became known in 2021, when, five days before her 117th birthday, she recovered from a coronavirus infection. She had contaminated herself in the nursing home where she lived, in Toulon (southeastern France) – in which, of the 88 residents, 81 were infected and 10 died.
At the time, she remained sane. In an interview with French radio the previous year, she told of having suffered a lot during the First World War, which began when she was ten years old, and claimed to remember her two brothers returning from the front, one of them seriously wounded.
Granddaughter of a Protestant pastor, Lucile converted to Catholicism at age 27. She worked as a governess before entering a convent in 1944 at the age of 40. After the Second World War, she cared for the elderly and orphans for 28 years at the Vichy Hospital.
This text is being updated.
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