Shelbyville woman, oldest in America, pushing onward

SHELBYVILLE, Ind.--Wearing a pink jogging suit, Edna Parker sits quietly in her wheelchair. Her bony hands lay in her lap clasped together. \nHer grandson, Don Parker, sits in a rocking chair beside her. Looking up at his grandmother, he converses with her in a familiar way.\nAbout life. About anything. Until she begins to remember.\n“Do you remember when you were born, grandma?” he asks, attempting to jog her memory.\n“No,” she replies softly. \n“Oh you remember the month, I’m sure. What month were you born?”\n“April,” she replies. April 20, 1893, to be exact. \nIn a little less than a month, Edna Parker will be 114. But already at 113, she is the oldest living American. She is also the second oldest woman alive, one of 83 currently living supercentenarians – people who are 110 years old or older. \nYone Minagawa, who is from Japan, is the oldest woman alive at 114, according to the Gerontology Research Group.\nAt the Heritage House Convalescent Center in Shelbyville, where Edna Parker has been living since 1997, she is something of a celebrity.\nParker’s celebrity status is shared, as the world’s tallest woman, Sandy Allen, resides in Heritage as well. Allen stands at 7 feet 7 inches tall.\n“It’s weird because none of us thought about it,” Social Service Director Nadine Davenport said of the two women. “But then multiple phone calls about Edna were received, and I guess we do have a hot one in here. We take care of them both as best we can.”\nShe never worries. She’s always positive. And it’s her perseverance, along with the other two qualities, that Don Parker attributes to her wealth in old age.\nAnother one of Edna’s grandsons, Russell Parker, works on the IU campus as a documentation specialist for the Office of the Registrar.\nRussell Parker lived with his grandmother through his junior high and high school years, before he went away to college.\n“It was very much home. She made it a home,” Russell Parker said of living with Edna. “What I really saw in her, besides being sweet and thoughtful, was her work ethic.”\n“Early to bed, early to rise,” is a motto Russell Parker said his grandmother lives by. Edna Parker lived alone until she was 100. During that time she would wake up between 4:30 and 6:30 a.m. and “get right into it” with her daily chores. \n“Before she was in a nursing home she was always outside, working with flowers,” Don Parker said. With Edna’s upbringing and experience working on a farm, she always enjoyed the outdoors, Don Parker said.\n“Learn to do the common things uncommonly well” is an adage that Russell Parker attributes to his grandmother. \n“That is a foundation for me, and I would say she has given me a deep sense of rootedness because when I moved in with her she was in her early 80s, so there was just a steadiness and wisdom about her,” Russell Parker said. “During certain times you can really see what we were taught as kids in the book of proverbs.”\nEdna Parker frequently recites poetry, along with getting in her daily sleep, during her days at Heritage.\n“She likes to get up and go for a walk occasionally, and she loves listening to the girls play the piano,” Davenport, the social service director, said. \nWith their lucky gene inheritances, supercentenarians like Edna Parker live long and leave others, like Davenport, questioning how they can live so long.\n“Other than God, I have no clue, but it’s amazing,” she said of Edna Parker’s age. “It’s just hard for me to calculate or imagine being alive for 113 years. But we just keep thinking she is an angel and has a purpose but it hasn’t been fulfilled yet.”