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Three weeks after celebrating her 105th birthday - Belize’s most famous and loved centenarian is dead. Viola Myles died Sunday morning at the Sister Cecilia Home for the Elderly. She had been living there since august of last year when she fell in her home on West Street and fractured her shoulder blade. An attendant at the Sister Cecilia Home says on Sunday morning Viola Myles didn’t want to eat breakfast – she told them she was tired and went back to bed. Two hours later she was discovered dead. It’s a peaceful end to a woman who the nation fell in love with and looking through archives today – we easily saw why.

Keith Swift Reporting,
Viola Myles was always funny, feisty at times, spunky even but still charming and graceful – like at her 103rd birthday party on February 24th of 2006.

[February 24th, 2006]
Viola Myles,
“I am so thankful to hear all the nice things but you know, I know them because I know myself. I am so happy. I am not going to say, 'I can't do this and a can't do that.' I did everything that I could."

Our most memorable interview with Miss Viola was in July of 2005 when armed thieves invaded her home on West Street -and the then 102 year old said she wouldn’t have gone down without a fight.

[July 14th, 2005]
Viola Myles, Victim of Home Invasion
"I was sitting on the bed and then I caught a glimpse of something and somebody's face. I thought it was someone of the boys from down there playing with me. I couldn't think it was something like that. Anyway if she (Anselma) wasn't here, I don't know what would have happened. I don't want to kill anybody because I want to go to heaven and I don't want to be a murderer. But if they fool with me I will do it and beg the Lord pardon."

Every step she says she took with her Lord but - even at her birthday parties - Miss Myles never liked talking about her age or death. She preferred living each day as if it was her last. She told me as much in her last interview with Channel 7 – at her 104th birthday party on February 24th 2007.

[February 24th, 2007]
Viola Myles: I don't feel no way, I am just Viola, that's all.
KS: you have a birthday wish this year?
Viola Myles: I don't wish for nothing, anytime the lord says to come home gial, I am ready.
KS: You don't seem ready though.
Viola Myles: I don't seem ready?Cho.
KS: I am in my 20s, when you were in your twenties did you ever think you would get to be a 104?
Viola Myles: I never thought of nothing to come, I am just going, that's all.
KS: You are blest, very blest.
Viola Myles: I am. I know I am blest and I can sing the chorus. [singing 'I am blest.']
KS: you look full of life, at 104 are you in any pain or have constant headache or so?
Viola Myles: I feel sometimes some pain all about here and there but I don't study it. When I can't, I get up and I do what I have to do, nothing much.
KS: Do you have a secret to such a long life?
Viola Myles: I don't have any secret, only the lord is keeping me until when he is ready for me.

Her Lord was ready on Sunday morning.

A funeral is scheduled for Wednesday afternoon at the Salvation Army Church on Cemetery Road. Myles has no blood relative in Belize and that is because she is originally from Jamaica. She came here with the Salvation Army. Her closest relative is a goddaughter in Belmopan. We couldn’t confirm if Viola Myles was the oldest Belizean but she was indeed the most famous centenarian.