Bajan centenarian Mae Bishop, who stopped counting her birthdays after she reached the age of 30, has died in New York at 102.
Bishop’s “little idiosyncrasy,” as a daughter described it, of observing the anniversary of her 30th birthday, received front page treatment in one of America’s best known national papers, the New York Times, in March. The headline: Honouring A Long Life? But She’s Just 70 Plus 31.
So when she reached 102 recently, the family quietly observed the 72nd anniversary of her 30th birthday.
She is the mother of Colga Hylton-Springer and Hazel Bishop Alexis.
Christian Hylton, a Bajan attorney at City Hall, the seat of New York’s City’s local government, confirmed his grandmother’s death in Brooklyn on Wednesday and said: “We regret her passing and mourn her death but we are thankful for her full life.”
When she reached 100 years old in 2008, the family, aware of Bishop’s idiosyncrasy concerning her age, held a party attended by about 200 relatives and friends and in deference to the centenarian’s sensitivities sent invitations that referred to the “70th anniversary of her 30th birthday”.
During the party, Bishop was overheard saying to a friend: “I don’t know what they are going to do when I’m 100, because they’re making such a fuss now.”
She came to the United States from Barbados in 1957 to join her husband, a merchant seaman, and worked for years as a housekeeper at a well known Park Avenue hotel in Manhattan until she retired in 1976. She lived since 1966 in her own two-storey Brooklyn town house.
As her relatives explained it, Bishop, a strong-willed woman with a quick wit, took great pride in her appearance at all times.
“Even ten years ago, she wouldn’t come down stairs without her wig, her eyebrow pencil, her make-up,” explained Ms Hylton-Springer.
Concerning self-consciousness about age, the daughter recalled that her mother first “started to say she wasn’t really that age, that her mother died when she was young – which was true – and that nobody knew her real age. The birth certificate, she would say, was wrong.”
