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New Jersey’s oldest resident, Edith Hodes Rose, has died at the age of 111, according to reports.
She passed away at her Winchester Gardens retirement community home in Maplewood on Jan. 11, according to The Village Green.
Despite being a rare supercentenarian, the great-grandmother — who was born and raised in the Garden State — never understood the fuss surrounding her age.
“It’s just a number and if I wake up in the morning, it’s another day to appreciate the fortunate life I enjoy,” Rose told the newspaper ahead of her 110th birthday in 2020.
Asked about the secret to her longevity, Rose declared at the time that it was down to “dumb luck.”
When she died last week, Rose was the eldest person living in New Jersey and also among the top 30 oldest residents in the US, according to the Gerontology Research Group.
“For her, it was not something that she boasted about or set out to accomplish,” her daughter Joan Epstein told the NJ.com
.
“People would say how amazing it was, and she would just say, ‘Well, it’s out of my control.’”
She was born in Newark in 1910 after her parents, Hyman and Fanny Hodes, emigrated from Russia. She was one of the couple’s eight children.
Rose — who was working for the Newark Board of Education at the time — ended up meeting her future husband, attorney Joseph P. Rose, on one of her frequent trips to an athletic club in New York City.
They married in 1938 and went on to have three children — Marc, Joan and Charles — who they raised in Maplewood.
When their children were grown, the couple ended up retiring to Brick Township in 1971. Rose moved back to Maplewood when Joseph died, aged 95, in 2002.
Rose’s family said she showed no signs of slowing down until last year when her body started to struggle.
Rose, who was preceded in death by her son Marc, is survived by her four grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren.
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