100-Year-Old Woman Has Wish Granted, Gets to See the Ocean for the First Time

Ruby Holt will turn 101 years old in December. She’s done a lot in her life, but she’s only ever left Tennessee once. She says she never had enough money to travel, or was just too busy raising her four kids, picking cotton, and then working in a shirt factory.

Now she lives in an assisted living home and, last summer, during a “schedule water gun fight” she off handedly mentioned that she’d never seen the ocean before. (Don’t think we glossed over the fact that these grandparents are having scheduled water gun fights. We’d pay anything to watch that.)

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“I’ve heard people talk about it and how wonderful it was and wanted to see it,” Ruby told the Associated Press. “But I never had the opportunity to do so.”

So her caregivers set a plan in motion. They worked with a non-profit that grants wishes to senior citizens, called The Wish of a Lifetime organization, to bring Ruby from Tennessee to the Perdido Beach Resort on the Gulf of Mexico.

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The AP says that Ruby was “speechless” when she saw the ocean for the first time from her hotel room. And when she got down to the sand, she said, “We don’t have nothing like this in Giles County.”

But when she dipped her toe in the water for the first time, her reaction was, “It’s cold!” (Which is probably because it’s winter. But when you’re 100, you’re 100, and why wait?)

While we’re talking about remarkable lives, watch this remembrance of The Graduate director Mike Nichols and his lasting legacy in film: