I wondered if I'd be that tired, too, after surmounting my first century of life and then digging my heels into the next. Cecilia said: "I've just always enjoyed my life as it is, but I never did much." While her husband, Bert, was plowing the family's five acres on A Street, between Washington and Owens Avenues, using only his miracle worker's talents and a team of mules to make sweet corn, sugarcane and other crops grow from the desert ground, or digging pools at the Strip's first hotel—El Rancho—Cecilia was preserving herself indoors, rearing three children, all boys, within the confines of their home, which still stands today. "I was just a homebody," she said.
And perhaps that's why she outlived her husband, who died of prostate cancer 28 years ago, at the respectable age of 83. Neither Cecilia nor Bert smoked, and neither drank. Bert exercised daily. Cecilia did not. Like many survivors of the Great Depression she ate anything that came her way with the indiscriminate voracity of a happy child, except for cheese and butter, from which she abstained due to a bad childhood experience and not because she harbored any hopes for longevity. She never sought to be a centenarian, yet her first 10 decades passed without event, concluding in a birthday bash that involved more than 150 people, many of them children, and Cecilia herself, acting half her age, begging to spread the party out over the night and well into eternity. Just as she did in 1929, when she came to Las Vegas, a rudimentary town that had been christened four years after she had, and never once entertained thoughts of leaving the Valley. The reasons—as they persist in her barebones memory—were simple:
"Las Vegas was so beautiful, and I had a husband, and I was happy."
In bits and murmurs she recounted stories from those days to me, her every sentence trailing off into unintelligible reveries, and without transition she concluded:
"And now I am so alone ... so alone ... I'm so alone."
Because, I gathered, the cross of very old age is loneliness. She's outlived everyone—her neighbors, her friends, her siblings, her husband, one of her boys—and as her 70-year-old son Rollie half jokes, half laments: "She'll probably outlive me, too."
Born in 1901, Cecilia Flynn, a sister of seven, became an orphan at 13, when her dad died. Her mom had died four years earlier. She grew from a girl to a woman under her older sister's tutelage, and then into a Gibbs and a content mother under her husband's undying love.
"But now I am just a little baby again," she said.
It's true: Her body has been reduced to its essentials: visible bones, transparent skin with splattered liver marks and little elasticity, her five senses sandpapered by time, her petite frame shrunken. And in similar fashion her thoughts have been reduced to the fundamental ingredients of humanity. When asked about her sister, she says, only: "She loved me, and I loved her." When asked about her vacation to Hawaii, she says, merely: "Ooohhhh, it was beautiful." And when asked about her first time fishing at Lake Mead, which would become a hobby between her and Bert, she just says: "There was so much water, and I was afraid."
The Palms at Sienna assisted-living community will throw Cecilia an early birthday party on Friday, August 25. It will be a celebration more for historical purposes than Cecilia's, and if she can stay awake long enough she will many times have to respond to the same question I posed to her before leaving:
So, how is one to live to be 105 years old?
"I just take care of myself," she told me. "I'm getting old now, and that's all I can think of."