At 100-years-old, Allene Honeycutt did whatever she felt up to doing. Most days, that was pretty much everything.
“Boy, did she have energy,” exclaimed Linda Holden, one of the managers at the Regency House, the senior living community in Decatur where Honeycutt lived. “She’d be out there with beanbag bingo or whatever we had going on.”
Carol Hollahan said her mother was “a lot like that little Energizer bunny.”
“But she moved very slowly, as not to fall,” said her daughter, who lives in Decatur. “She was so very careful.”
On Dec. 12, Allene Turlington Honeycutt fell in her residence and broke her hip. She died Dec. 21 of complications from the injury.
Services are planned for 11 a.m. on Thursday at Rose and Graham Funeral Home, Coats, N.C. Interment will follow at Devotional Gardens, Dunn, N.C. A memorial service in Decatur is planned for 2 p.m. on Sunday at the Regency House. A.S Turner & Sons is in charge of local arrangements.
Honeycutt was born and reared in Coats, N.C. She spent the majority of her life in North Carolina and went to college in Greenville.
“Her mother really wanted her to go to college, so they scraped together enough money and she went,” Hollahan said. “She was one quarter short of finishing because when she came home for Christmas, she and daddy got married. She never went back.”
The former Allene Turlington married James Honeycutt in 1933 and the couple eventually raised two daughters. They built a home in Coats, where they shared 39 years of marriage until he died in 1972. Honeycutt lived in that house until she was 95, her daughter said.
“She called me up one day and said, ‘Do you know what I did today? I put my house up for sale.’ And I nearly fainted,” Hollahan said. “We’d talked about her moving, but my sister and I wanted it to be her decision. And it was.”
Honeycutt’s move to Decatur and the Regency House went smoothly. Although “it wasn’t home for her, she was happy,” Hollahan said.
In March to celebrate her 100th birthday, Honeycutt had two parties, one in Decatur and another back in Coats.
“She was really an amazing woman and sometimes I thought she’d be here forever,” her daughter said. “She kept on going, even when she didn’t feel good.”
Holden said she and her husband have been managing the independent living community for less than a year, but Honeycutt taught them a lifetime of lessons in that short time.
“Through her, I saw that it doesn’t matter how old you are. You can still get out there and do things and participate in life,” she said. “And you can laugh and enjoy every day. That’s what she did.”
In addition to Hollahan, Honeycutt is survived by a daughter, Rebecca Cohen of Tucson, Ariz.; five grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.
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