Woman reaches a milestone; over 100 years plus

Justina Carias

The following story will make you smile. Meet Justina Carias of Santa Familia in the west. Few have lived to tell their story; but she has for ten decades plus some. When we caught up with Carias today, she was all smiles and looking forward for her birthday party. News Five’s Delahnie Bain today met this incredible woman.

Delahnie Bain, Reporting

Plans are underway for a huge birthday celebration this Sunday as Justina Carias of Santa Familia, Cayo turns one hundred and three years old. The gathering will bring together five generations of the Carias family.

Justina Carias, Centenarian

“I want to see all my family come together again. I can’t wait for the celebration.”

David Cabb, Grandson, Justina Carias

“We are planning to get together with as much of the family as possible because it’s not every day that a grandparent gets to be a hundred and odd years—a hundred and three to be specific.”

Delahnie Bain

“And this is something that you do every year?”

David Cabb

“Yes on a yearly basis we have been meeting together to celebrate with her. She usually likes all of us to be together, she complains sometimes when we do not come to visit her because we are very much a close family.”

David Cabb

… A close family of over five hundred members, including great, great, great grand children.

David Cabb

“She was born on the twenty-sixth of September 1908, the daughter of Eliodoro Elias and Demetria Lopez. She got married to Lucio Carias; of that wedlock came ten children, five boys and five girls. But then from there the family started to grow. My mother made her a grandmother when she was thirty-eight years old because I was born on the first of March, forty-six. She has seventy-nine grandchildren, three hundred and one great grandchildren, two hundred and eight great, great grand children and five great, great, great grandchildren.”

And while the occasion is celebratory, Carias’ hundred and three years are starting to tell on her. Today she was in high spirits, even though she wasn’t feeling well.

Justina Carias

“The only thing that I feel worried about is that I feel very bad in my head. I can’t see and it’s like I’m lost. I’m not feeling well, my head hurts badly and I’m fighting to hear. It’s like I’m deaf. I don’t hear well you know.  But I have faith in God and I try not to worry about things.”

David Cabb

“We have been amazed constantly because her pressure is normal, her heart is working excellently. With the exception of her complaining about her head, of course she’s not hearing too well nor she can’t see too well which would be obvious at her age. To have her conscious of what is going on around her in itself is a great blessing because my father recently died and he was eighty-eight years old. We have been hearing people dying far younger than her and the last checkup that she had, everything was normal.”

Her oldest grandson, David Cabb, says it is a blessing to have her around at this stage of his life.

David Cabb

“I think not only for myself, but for the whole family, it’s a great blessing. In her we see the blessing of God because he had said that a person can see even his fourth generation—he would be blessed up to the fourth generation. She had been blessed with her fifth generation. The way we are seeing things I think she will outlive many of us. She has two sons dead already and several of her son-in-laws already died. So she’s still going strong. Of course she needs help to move around because she can’t see properly. Well, she’s unable to see any at all.”

Delahnie Bain

“But in terms of the actual walking, she has the strength to walk around and so on?”

David Cabb

“Yes, yes.”

Delahnie Bain for News Five.