Emerson Phillips
In a manner of speaking, Lucile Randon has been around the block.
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Randon is a 118-year-old nun from France, and she’s now the world’s oldest living person. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, she’s the new title holder following the April 19, 2022 death of 119-year-old Japanese woman Kane Tanaka.
Randon was born in Ales, southern France, on February 11, 1904 – just 56 days after the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk, NC and a decade before the start of World War I.
She didn’t become a nun until age 40, but she’s been serving others all her life.
She worked as a teacher and a governess. She looked after children during WWII. She worked full-time until the late 1970s, spending 28 years working with orphans and elderly people at a hospital in the Vichy region of France. Later in life she had to go into a nursing home, but she still helped care for the other residents until she was 100 years of age.
But age has taken its toll, if not her independent spirit. She’s lost her vision, and she’s in a wheelchair. Her days now begin at 7am with breakfast followed by morning mass. She has a radio but she no longer listens to it because the outside world is too stressful, she says. And even though she’s now blind, she’s now setting her sights on outliving the oldest reported person in modern history – another French woman, Jeanne Calment, who lived to be 122. Calment died in 1997.
Emmanuel Macron was among Randon’s many well-wishers this past New Year’s day – the French president sent her a hand-written note – and she received many other letters, and even a few boxes of chocolate. Worth noting, because chocolate seems to be a common thread between the the longest living people.
Calment, Tanaka, and Randon are all said to have had a sweet tooth.Aside from the chocolate, admirers often ask Randon the secret to her longevity.
“Only the good Lord knows,” she says with a smile.
