It’s a plotline straight out of Terry Gilliam’s satire “Brazil”: a woman with a cap of snow-colored hair, born in 1900, is denied, vis-à-vis the enigmatic machinations of a monolithic bureaucracy, the continuation of her public assistance stipend.
Why? Because the Guadalajara native dared to live long enough.
The Secretaría de Desarrollo e Integración Social (SEDIS), a government body responsible for social welfare – and for the Adulto Mayor program which provides assistance to elderly people – decided Maria Felix Nava had worn out her welcome at the fearsome age of 116. Unbeknownst to the blameless centenarian, she had already survived six years past the maximum assistance-receiving age, 110.
Clearly, SEDIS imagines that after the age of 110, human beings pass into another biological phase, one in which the power to photosynthesize nutrients is suddenly acquired.
After having her assistance denied, Doña Mary and her daughter Marina Gutiérrez went to complain at the SEDIS offices, but were confronted by typical governmental opacity. They met with much the same result over the telephone.
“I leave it with God. He won’t abandon me. He’ll send me good people to help me,” Doña Mary told local newspaper Mural.
Her Blanche Dubois-like faith in the kindness of strangers wasn’t misplaced, as it turned out.
The weekend after the story broke, she found herself entertaining a bunch of strangers with designs upon augmenting her well-being with food and vitamins.
Shortly after this, SEDIS, presumably under public pressure, decided to discontinue its embargo against her. Director Miguel Castro Reynoso even paid a visit to Doña Mary at her residence, personally handing her the card she uses to extract her monthly benefits.
The coup de grace of beneficence the universe had decided to demonstrate towards Doña Mary came in the form of a woman wishing to remain anonymous, who showed up one day to inform her that she intended to donate 2,000 pesos so she could “treat herself.”
“I’m feeling very happy, more than thankful. It makes me laugh and cry,” she told Mural.
This July, Doña Mary will celebrate her 117th year with the help of “some youngsters who will come and bring music and help me party how I like: eating, drinking beer and dancing.”