The Aide Who Drove Ludie to the Ocean

Mrs. Alma Sizemore turned her whole chair around to face me. The woman who always shouted for her sister quit shouting.

I had planned to walk out with my head up, and I did, but I will tell you the truth. My eyes were not dry, and I went the last fifteen feet with my hand over my mouth.

The sliding doors let me out into a cold, bright morning, and I sat in my Subaru with the engine off for a very long time.

I should tell you how I got there. It starts with a hat.

Ludie Dot Cobb was ninety-two years old and weighed about as much as a good-sized dog. For thirty-one years she drove Bus 14 for the Halifax County schools, up Dry Fork Road and down Cedar Creek, and half the grown people in Boyd’s Ferry had learned to read their first road signs from her front seat.

She came to us four years ago after a fall in her own kitchen. Her husband, Burl, had been dead since 1998, and they never had children. Her only kin was a nephew in Charlotte named Gil, who sent a card at Christmas and flowers at Easter.

She kept a navy straw church hat on the shelf above her bed, the one with a little white feather, and she wore it for every doctor’s visit and every hospice nurse’s visit, because she said a woman ought to meet bad news in her good hat.

I was thirty-eight that fall. I had been Ludie’s aide on the day shift for most of those four years, and I loved her the plain way you love somebody whose feet you have washed.

In September her heart finally gave out the way the doctors had said it would. They moved her onto hospice, put her on oxygen at two liters, and a nurse named Dee Whitlow started coming three times a week.

Dee told me in the hallway what the numbers were. Days to weeks, she said. Probably weeks, if she was lucky and stubborn, and Ludie was both.

On a Tuesday night in early October I was turning her for the night, tucking the blanket under her shoulder the way she liked. She looked at the ceiling and said, “Joelle, have you ever seen the ocean?”

“Twice,” I said. “Once when I was nine, and once on my honeymoon, when Pete got sunburned so bad he slept on the floor.”

She laughed, and the laugh turned into a cough, and I waited it out with my hand on her back.

“I saw it one time,” she said. “April of 1955. Burl borrowed his brother’s Ford and we drove down to the Oceanside Motel at Virginia Beach. Six dollars a night, and we only stayed the one.”

“You never went back?”

“The tobacco barn burned that fall. After that there was always something.” She turned her head on the pillow. “Burl made me take my shoes off. He said you have to give the ocean your feet before it will remember you.”

I did not say anything.

“I’d like to give it my feet one more time,” Ludie said. “Before I go and tell Burl about it.”

That was all she said. She did not ask me to take her. Ludie never asked anybody for anything, which is the whole reason I could not let it go.