Meet Pricilla: An Independent 99-Year-Old Who Inspires Us
Pricilla has lived in Marin ever since she and her husband moved from Boston. Today, she has lived in her apartment complex longer than any other resident.
“I’ve lived right here in Marin, never moved, for 58 years,” says Pricilla. “I can’t believe I’ve been here for 58 years—half my life! We thought we wanted to live in San Francisco. We were living in Boston and liked the city life, but a friend of ours who lived here and worked at the old trade fair said ‘Don’t go back to San Francisco until you see this apartment.’ We liked everything about it, so we took my piano and moved in.”
For years, Pricilla and her husband built a beautiful life in Marin. They hosted formal dinner parties in their apartment and enjoyed spending time with friends. Pricilla worked as a legal secretary and her husband was a retired army colonel. “I continued to work until the man I worked for passed away,” Pricilla explains. “I had been with him 22 years. When he died, I decided I had worked long enough. I was 85 years old!”
At 99 years old, Pricilla is bright and enthusiastic. She walks laps around the parking lot of her apartment complex to stay active, spends the afternoons fixing quilts that her mother made, and has occasional visits from friends. These days, though, she can’t move around as well as she used to. After falling and breaking her hip a year ago, Pricilla is mostly homebound.
“I was standing in front of my bureau and pulled out a drawer to put a sweater in the drawer and I fainted for some strange reason,” recalls Pricilla. “I fell in such a way that I broke my hip. I didn’t have the phone and couldn’t move. Fortunately, I had invited a friend by that afternoon and she decided to check on me when I didn’t answer the phone. She found someone who had a key, and there I was on the floor. They immediately called 911 and I went to the hospital.”
Because she is homebound, Pricilla receives meals from Vivalon three days a week, delivered by a Vivalon driver named Joe. She greets him with a wide smile, holding her cane in one hand and her handheld hearing aid in the other. She continues to have occasional visits from friends and someone to help her clean and run errands, but the meals she receives from Vivalon are her primary source of nutrition and help her stay in her home.
It’s estimated that a third of seniors in Marin struggle to put food on the table or don’t know where their next meal is coming from. Vivalon delivers over 130,000 meals a year to hundreds of our neighbors right here in Marin who are just like Pricilla. They receive these meals thanks to kind support from our community.
This month, we are celebrating March for Meals. If you haven’t heard of March for Meals before, it’s one of the most important times of the year for Meals on Wheels. In 1965, a historic national nutrition program for seniors was brought forth, casting light on food insecurity issues within this population. Today, the challenges continue, and the need of older, homebound adults for these meals is as critical as ever.
When you donate to Vivalon for March for Meals, you are helping provide meals, friendly visits, and critical safety net services for Pricilla and others like her – the secretaries, nurses, and teachers who worked their whole lives to make our community what it is today.
Please join us in remembering this important program with a gift to Vivalon today. Your support truly does mean so much to our neighbors. Click here to donate. Interested in volunteering for Meals on Wheels? Contact our Volunteer Team at 415-456-9067 or [email protected].
