The Oldest VNSNY Patient Is Also the Oldest American!
America’s oldest resident is under the watchful care of VNSNY Home Care’s Manhattan Branch 6
Alelia Murphy was born in North Carolina in 1905, when Theodore Roosevelt was president. Today, at age 113 (she’ll turn 114 on July 6), Ms. Murphy is the oldest living person in the United States. When asked her secret to a long life, she has a ready answer: “Trust in God and be a good person.”
Ms. Murphy has lived an active, happy life, which, according to her VNSNY nurse Natalia Mhlambiso, “is as good a recipe as any” for longevity. She attended college in North Carolina before marrying and moving to New York, where she was a seamstress, a baker, and an award-winning salesperson for Fuller products. She was also a passionate dancer, being regularly tossed into the air while jitterbugging at Harlem’s storied Savoy Manor.
“She grew up in the South in the days before processed food, so she ate very healthy,” adds Natalia. “Keeping active when you are younger, and eating healthy and continuing to do so—it really does help a lot.”
In 2018, VNSNY provided care to over 845 New Yorkers aged 100 years and older. As these patients’ VNSNY interdisciplinary care teams will tell you, centenarians require an extra measure of attention, since a decline in health can happen quickly. Natalia visits Ms. Murphy twice a week to clean and change the dressing on a non-healing hip wound and to check her medications and overall well-being. She also communicates regularly with Ms. Murphy’s close-knit family and with her doctor, who comes to the apartment through Mount Sinai Health System’s Visiting Doctor Program, which partners with VNSNY.
Ms. Murphy’s rich and varied life is on full display at her Harlem apartment of many decades. The residence is filled with family photographs and a “proclamation wall” with citations from local officials honoring her long life. In the more than five years that Natalia has been visiting Ms. Murphy in her home, the VNSNY nurse has also become a familiar face and sounding board to many of her elderly neighbors. “It’s a good feeling,” Natalia says, “being here to help.”
