Lucile Randon, the word's oldest person, dies at the age of 118 after surviving Covid-19 outbreak in her nursing home

The world's oldest person has died in her care home in Toulon, France at the age of 118.

Lucile Randon became the oldest person in the world last year, after she outlived Japan’s Kane Tanaka who died aged 119. Before that Randon, who had been a nun, was long feted as the oldest European.

She was born before the Titanic was built and was an 8-year-old child when the famous ship sank in 1912. She lived through two world wars, huge technological advances and accelerating globalisation of travel and culture.

Randon was born on February 11, 1904, the year New York opened its first subway, and World War I was still a decade away.

When asked the secret to a long life she said it was to continue working. Not the answer I think most of us were hoping to hear sister.

Randon, who took the name of Sister Andre when she became a nun in 1944, died in her sleep on Tuesday 17 January 2023 at the nursing home where she lived.

"There is great sadness but … it was her desire to join her beloved brother. For her, it’s a liberation," spokesperson David Tavella, of the Sainte-Catherine-Laboure nursing home in the southern French town of Toulon, told the media.

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

One of her fondest memories was the return of two of her brothers at the end of the war in 1918, 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.

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

She became a Catholic and was baptised at the age of 26. Driven by a desire to "go further", she joined the Daughters of Charity order of nuns when she was 41.

Sister Andre was then assigned to a hospital in Vichy, France, 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.

"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 needed 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.

In 2021, she survived a bout of Covid-19 after the virus swept through the nursing home where she lived, killing 10 other residents. At the time, she told Var-Matin newspaper: "I didn’t even realise I had it."

Randon told French radio in 2020 she had no idea how she had lived so long. "I’ve no idea what the secret is. Only God can answer that question," she said. "I’ve had plenty of unhappiness in life and during the 1914-1918 war when I was a child, I suffered like everyone else."

It is likely that France’s new oldest person is now 112-year-old Marie-Rose Tessier, a woman from Vendee. Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 at the age of 122 in Arles, southern France, holds the record for the oldest confirmed age reached by any human. There's clearly something about the French way of life that aids longevity.

Lucile had a 'joie de vivre' and maybe that's the real secret of her long life.