LYNN — Dressed in white, Angelet Dorvilas-Gredeon stood by the doorway of the decked-out event room in Hibernian Hall last Saturday evening as she waited for her extended family to arrive in droves.
The occasion? To celebrate their grandmother’s 118th birthday.
“She’s special,” Dorvilas-Gredeon said of the family’s matriarch. “She’s my doll.”
In the center of the room and donned in an entirely gold ensemble, Dorrisile Dervis sat in her wheelchair as Dorvilas-Gredeon’s children — Olivia (9), and Carter (6) — played games beside their great-grandmother.
Dervis has more than 100 grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and “she loves all of them,” Dorvilas-Gredeon said. “She’s held pretty much everybody in the family (as a baby).”
According to Dervis’s family, the Lynn resident of three years was born Christmas Day in 1901 in Jean Rabel, Haiti.
If so, this would make Dervis the oldest living person in the world by eight days. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the title is currently held by Japan’s Kane Tanaka, who was born Jan. 2, 1902.
To provide some context to this, the year Dorrisile Dervis says she was born is the same year the United States saw Theodore Roosevelt become president (upon the assassination of William McKinley) and one year before the first overseas radiotelegraph message was delivered.
She has lived through both World Wars, the sinking of the Titanic, and some of the most tumultuous years in Haiti’s history.
However, an official title of “oldest living person” will likely always elude Dervis, who was born during a time and in a place where recording births wasn’t a common practice.
“People say, ‘how do you know that’s for real?'” Dorvilas-Gredeon said. “It’s (a fact) if you think about it. Her son passed away eight years ago at the age of 90. We can’t prove the real, actual birth certificate, but … it just makes sense.”
For Dervis’ grandchildren and great-grandchildren, though, the storied life of their beloved grandmother transcends any official document.
Dorvilas-Gredeon’s younger sister, Regina McNish, said she considers herself to be the family historian and spent much of her childhood listening to stories about her grandmother’s early life in Haiti, which was often difficult.
“Around that time there was a lot of slavery and war in Haiti,” she said. “So she had stories of hiding in bushes because she saw soldiers passing by.
“It was amazing (to hear her stories),” McNish said. “Instead of playing outside with my friends, I would be sitting next to her, listening. She had children who disappeared that to this day, she never knew what happened to them. She had children who got sick through food poisoning (because) somebody poisoned them.”
When asked if she felt her grandmother had an impact on who she is today, McNish replied, “oh, most definitely.”
She said one of the most important lessons her grandmother imparted on her was to be loving to others.
“Love. Wherever you go, show love,” McNish said. “That’s just what she embodies. Growing up, she raised all the neighborhood kids because everybody trusted her with them. She would discipline them, teach them morals.”
She added: “She instilled those things in us.”
Dorvilas-Gredeon said she chose to request that everyone in the family wear white to the party as a way to honor her grandmother, who she referred to as “the rock of the family and our angel.”
As the eldest sister in her immediate family, Dorvilas-Gredeon in many ways has become a caretaker and strong family figure like her grandmother, who now lives with Dorvilas-Gredeon and her children.
“I’m taking care of her and I’m exhausted, but I don’t care,” she said of Dervis. “She deserves it because she worked her whole life for that.”
