There’s truly no age limit when it comes to fun!
Michael Graham of Choctaw, Oklahoma shared a sweet video from Fourth of July weekend of his grandfather, a 94-year-old United States Army Air Corps veteran, making his way down a waterslide.
In the Facebook video, family members helped Roy Beller up the stairs to the waterslide, cheering him on the entire way down to his graceful landing.
“When your 94-year-old Papa says I’m going down the water slide that means he’s going down the water slide!” the Oklahoma native captioned the now-viral video. “I love him so much and hope to be half the man he has been through his life.”
The video has amassed nearly 8 million views and has been shared almost 200,000 times since July 5.
"So cool," one person commented on the video. "Love how the young people are so attentive."
Another person added, "He is so awesome, I just love him and his positive attitude!"
“I actually posted it out there thinking that the whole family would all see the video and be excited about watching him go down,” Graham explained to TODAY. “I figured it would get a few hundred views. But when it hit a million, I called them up and said ‘Well, you got a million views’ and he said ‘Why in the world would a million people want to watch me going down a slide?’”
He answered his grandfather’s questions, adding, “I said two things that I see. One is people were really excited to see someone of your age still active and doing things. Then the other is there's been lots of comments, how much people can see the love in the family. And that's always been a big part of our life. He is the patriarch of the family and everybody gets together and has eachother's back.”
Graham’s grandfather didn’t need any influence to go down the water slide during the family party.
“The interesting thing was that slide was his idea,” he explained. “We were sitting in the pool and I helped him get down into the pool. He goes to get out and went over... I thought he was wanting to go get in the chair. And I said ‘Do you want to get over to the chair?’ and he said, ‘No, I'm going to go down that water slide.’”
After that, Graham called for his sons to come over and help their 94-year-old great-grandfather up the steps to the slide and make sure he was safe on the way down.
The Oklahoma native said seeing Beller care for his wife, who for the last 15 years of her life suffered from Alzheimers, really shaped and defined his perspective of what it means to love unconditionally
"I watched my grandpa take care of her every single day," Graham said of the couple, who was together for 67 years before she passed away. "He was up in age already, too, and I know how difficult that was on the body but he took care of her up until the day she died. That's when I saw what I would call the kind of love that you show to your spouse and to your family, and always being there no matter what you gotta go through."
Graham hopes that people can see everyday life and social media doesn’t need to be filled with so much vitriol, and can be filled instead with love and acceptance.
“If you have the right people in your life and you know, you have that love for one another,” he explained. “And I think everybody's just sick and tired of seeing, you know, all the hate and discontent that people are showing towards one another, instead of being able to just love on each other and be there for one another.”