Armenian-American Lucy Mirigian, who was believed to be the oldest person in San Francisco, has died, reports San Francisco Chronicle , per PanArmenian.
“She wasn’t really sick,” her daughter, Sonia Mirigian-Koujakian, said. “She died of being 114.”
Mirigian, who lived with her daughter and son-in-law in the same Balboa Park house she bought in 1950, died Friday, February 12 morning surrounded by her family.
She lived a full life, her family said, but didn’t really make news until the U.S. government decided in 2017, without any apparent proof, that she was already dead and no longer entitled to receive her $377-a-month government pension. The government said she had not responded to letters; Mirigian said she never got them.
Failing eyesight meant that Mirigian could best enjoy Giants games if her daughter put the TV very close to her face and then provided a running play-by-play. Her primary concession to age was switching not long ago from 500-piece jigsaw puzzles to 60-piece jigsaw puzzles, which she worked at the kitchen table, often with a glass of wine alongside.
Mirigian had survived several pandemics — there was a polio one and a typhoid one, in addition to the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918.
Photo by Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle 2018
