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12/28/2022 12:45 PMThe life of a centenarian does not happen without constantly moving forwards, as 102-year-old East Haven resident Lilian Belenardo understands from her century-long time among her family, friends, and those she cares about. An elemental part of that ever-onwards motion is to separate the bad from the good and solely rely on the latter.
“My belief is you take things as they come along,” Lilian says. “If you don’t care about it or like anything, just look the other way. [Other people], they have their own way of thinking, and you have yours.”
It is when one takes things as they come that a life can be lived fully, witnessing the greatest conflicts of the 20th century and seeing things built up or damaged.
“I’ve had just about every experience through life. I’ve seen the second World War; I’ve raised a big family; I’ve broken almost every bone in my body,” she says.
Lilian can really say that she has experienced just about everything there is in her life. In 1935, she was rescued at the sea in her hometown of New York City while she was on a boat.
“I swallowed an open safety pin and it stuck in my throat, and the seaplane came and got me off the Hudson River and flew me to Bellevue Hospital. They couldn’t get it up, they couldn't get it down” she remembers. “In those days, they didn’t put you to sleep for anything. Nurses all held you down, whether you screamed or not. I made all the newspapers in New York! So I’ve been through everything.”
But living life to the fullest would not be complete without looking after the health and safety of others, another significant staple in Lilian’s life. After moving to West Haven, she went to work in the administrative department at Yale New Haven Hospital, looking after employee benefits, but also took time to connect with patients at the facility, doing so all the way to her 80s.
This commitment to helping dates back to her early 20s when she was living in New York during World War II. With a sense of impending doom in the atmosphere, she took the step to make military-style dog tags for students at a school, as the fear of an attack on the United States was alive and well, and children who could’ve died in an attack would be identified.
“I printed dog tags for all the children in the school — 1,500 children. This before I even knew how to type,” she said. “I put them on the machine. Then, I didn’t know the keys automatically, I just did it. All these children had to wear them. If we ever heard any sirens going on, the children all had to get under their chairs and put their hands behind their neck. I typed all those tags up in the school in the basement.”
Lilian recalls American air fleets soaring in the Big Apple sky, surveying the airspace in the case of hostility and how others needed to ration food and look after one another during the turbulent and uncertain time of the early 1940s.
“Mayor [Fiorello] La Guardia used to tell us to boil coffee grounds over again to reuse them. It was really a trying time, but you just worked along with it. I didn’t sit and cry or brood.”
Overall, helping other people and keeping them soldiering on has been what has kept her going throughout her life, never without bringing a smile to their faces.
“I used to go around and help anybody. Any of my friends, visit them, cheer them up. I’m a great one for making people laugh. I don’t know why, but [people] say, ‘Oh my God, you’ve really made my day.' I love people.”
Those days are made also at the senior center, where she loves to spend much of her time, often three times per week, outside of her current residence at the Tyler Apartments complex. Her daughter, Dorothy Franco, said her mother loves to assist in serving food at the center and meet and talk with their usual guests. She used to run bus transportation for trips to casinos to Mohegan Sun and to the airport for trips to Las Vegas.
“I did this while at Yale. Every time I had off, I joined somebody who was taking a bus [transport seniors], and we grouped people, and brought them all to the airport, brought them all back,” she says. “It’s very lonely if I don’t go to the senior center.”
There is always the possibility to keep people going even when they are broken or ill. Lilian knows this personally outside of keeping close connections with her patients or in life in general. During a time in her life when she was working as a salesperson at a now-defunct W.T. Grant general store, she got sick and decided not to waste that time teaching herself how to type, which brought her to being a typist at the hospital.
“I bought a Royal typewriter, went and got a book from the library that taught you from scratch, and I covered the keys. I had a little infection and had to stay home. So I used that time with that book, and stuck with that for a couple of months,” she says.
It’s all part of Lilian’s belief that there are no excuses to slow down and not take on a new skill and go after anything that offers a chance to grow as a person.
“Grasp every opportunity you have to get more education. No matter what it is, try it, read it, and you may want to follow it that day,” she says emphatically. “I do what I feel like I want to do. Keep walking fast. And if you’re lonely and need something, get a dog!”