![World’s oldest person, 116-year-old Gertrude Weaver, dies days after being crowned](http://natmonitor.com/news/wp-content/uploads/Gertrude-Weaver_2.jpg)
Weaver died of complications from pneumonia only five days after 117-year-old Misao Okawa passed away.
The 116-year-old woman who had become the world’s oldest person just five days before has passed away. She was 116.
Gertrude Weaver, who was born all the way back in 1898, died of complications from pneumonia. She was living at the Silver Oaks Health and Rehabilitation Center in Camden, Ark., according to a Los Angeles Times report.
Silver Oaks administrator Kathy Langley called her passing “absolutely unexpected,” and said it was a “shock to all of us.” Langley added that everyone was “saddened by her loss, and she will be greatly missed.”
Weaver became the oldest woman in the world after a 117-year-old Japanese woman, Misao Okawa, died last week.
She will go down in the Guinness World Records as the seventh-oldest person ever, the first being Jeanne Clement, a French woman who passed away at 122 years and 164 days back in 1997.
Weaver last week told a local TV station that she “thank[s] God for that, I’m still alive,” asking with a laugh, “how do I look?”
People only typically hold the title for world’s oldest person for about a year, and this is not the first time a person has died shortly after attaining the title. In 2007, Emma Tillman of Connecticut passed just four days after being crowned as the oldest person in the world.
Weaver was born on July 4, 1898, in Texarkana, Ark., and had said she hoped President Obama would attend her 117th birthday party on her birthday this year. Weaver was married in 1915 and served as a homemaker and domestic worker, moving to Los Angeles in the 1950s before returning to Arkansas in the 1970s. She had four children with her husband, who died all the way back in 1969.
She has one surviving son, Joe, who is turning 94 years old soon and attended church services with her every Sunday.
The world’s oldest person is likely to be 115-year-old Jeralean Talley in Inkster, Mich.