A North Carolina man celebrating his birthday with friends on the beach Tuesday helped make an elderly man’s last wish come true by helping him ride a wave using a boogie board.
The elderly man’s wife told Ryan Giancola that her husband has dementia with one year to live and asked the group of men, who were vacationing in Duck in the Outer Banks, if they could help him experience what it is like to ride a wave.
Yesterday an elderly lady came up to us at the beach and asked if we could help fulfill her husbands wish to ride a wave one last time. She said that he is suffering from dementia and most likely has a year to live. What and amazing experience and on my birthday none the less! pic.twitter.com/RW0rdhugK6
— Ryan Giancola (@giancola_ryan) July 17, 2019
“Yesterday an elderly lady came up to us at the beach and asked if we could help fulfill her husband’s wish to ride a wave one last time,” Ryan Giancola wrote on Twitter. “She said that he is suffering from dementia and most likely has a year to live. What an amazing experience and on my birthday none the less!”
Giancola and a few of his friends assisted the man on a boogie board while he rode a few waves close to shore.
Giancola later posted the video to Twitter, where it went viral on social media. As of Monday morning, the video has been viewed at least 6.8 million times and has been retweeted more than 110,000 times.
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