There is no longer a known living person born before 1900 – IOTW Report

There is no longer a known living person born before 1900

117 year-old Emma Morano died in Italy on April 15th.

Yahoo-

In an interview with AFP last year, she put her longevity down to her diet.

“I eat two eggs a day, and that’s it. And cookies. But I do not eat much because I have no teeth,” she said in her home at the time, where the Guinness World Records certificate declaring her to be the oldest person alive held pride of place on a marble-topped chest of drawers.

She also refused to be taken to hospitals, with the exception of a cataract operation.

Her eyesight did become very poor and she spent much of her days sleeping.

But she kept her sense of humour till the end.

“How does my hair look,” she asked before blowing out the candles on her 117th birthday cake last year.

“What impresses me most is her memory. She forgets nothing,” Yamile Vergara, her nurse for over 40 years, said at the time.

“Her sense of humour is her therapy”.

The eldest of eight children, Morano outlived all of her younger siblings.

20 Comments on There is no longer a known living person born before 1900

  1. There’s a couple places covering this woman’s story. A couple of them have used a picture of her when she was in her prime. The way she should be remembered. Why is it they always use pictures of the deseased after they already have one foot in the grave. Certainly not the way anybody wants to be remembered. They do that to me and I’m coming back. By the way she was a very pretty lady.

  2. not sure why I have some sadness reading this story … it really means nothing, other than a number we assign to another passing group of years … but, to me, it feels the passing of a century’s generation … a generation that created the foundation of our world today
    yes, we have computers, tv’s, instant messaging, crap thrown into space, the Super Bowl… but think of the brass it took to lay the foundation, to conquer the world & tame it … to go out & explore new worlds, new places, new experiences that we, in our plastic protective lives will never have.
    In a way, I envy these people, their openness, their ability to seek out & change their individual worlds in ways we cannot today because of total government control
    gad! … I’m getting melancholy!!!

  3. I remember meeting some of those born before 1900. All had hard lives that make you ashamed about complaining about stuff like slow internet service.

    I also remember a guy who was a logger from Lake Tahoe. After the last clearing of timber you could buy that land for $25 an acre. That’s what the old guy told me when I was a kid.

  4. @bad Brad. Yes I do. I’ve got an old friend who is struggling to remain alive. He’s in his 80s and I barely recognize him. I’m sure his family will publish his pictures from when he was a linebacker for UVA back in the 50s.

  5. I don’t know if this is to be taken literally, but the Bible says:

    Gen. 6:3 “Then the LORD said, “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; nevertheless his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.”

  6. I’m only in my 50s and it seems like Im living in a foreign land, I can’t imagine being 117. Everyone you loved and truly shared your life with is gone, how strange the world must have become to her. Unless you live in physical or emotional isolation, which maybe she did… and she had cookies.

  7. It was a different world for that generation. They were in their prime during WWI and the Great Depression. Their evenings were spent reading or gathered around a radio. My grandfather was born in 1890 but he’s been gone for a long time.

  8. Do not think that because some one is old that they are out of touch with the world that they live in. I have spent time with Lois Van Der Leun, who at 102 years old is sharp as a tack,and loves to tell stories about the times she has lived through.
    http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/american_studies/my_mother_at_ni_1.php
    Last year she and a few of her friends stopped a major road project from going through in Chico. It would have made a mess of one of the loveliest streets in the city. 102 years old and still going strong. She is quite a gal, as is her son Gerard, both good friends.

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