Jimmy Carter’s grandson has revealed that the 99-year-old former president is “reaching the end.”
The Georgia peanut farmer and oldest living president has been in hospice care for more than a year after deciding to forgo any further medical treatment.
Since then, his beloved wife Rosalynn passed away and he has been living at home with regular visits from his family.
Jason Carter said at a mental health forum Tuesday: “(My grandfather) is fine.”
He’s been in hospice care, as you know, for almost a year and a half and I think he’s really coming to the end that, as I’ve said before, there’s a part of this faith journey that’s so important to him, and there’s a part of that journey of faith that you can only live at the end and I think he has been there in that space.
Jimmy Carter’s grandson has revealed that the 99-year-old former president is “reaching the end”
Carter entered hospice care in February 2023 after a series of hospital visits.
He has already survived metastatic brain and liver cancer.
In November, he made a rare public appearance for his wife Rosalynn’s funeral, in a wheelchair and covered in a blanket representing her face.
They were married for 77 years and lived in the same modest home in Plains, Georgia, for decades.
The longest-married couple in U.S. presidential history, they met when Jimmy was just three years old and Rosalynn was a newborn, and celebrated their 77th wedding anniversary on July 7, 2023.
Family members say he was determined to stick it out even after entering hospice care, in part to ensure Rosalynn would never be left alone.
“He was really honored and happy that he went all the way with my grandmother, and that was a real treasure to him,” Jason Carte told the New York Times in February.
‘I think for some reason the way he approaches this is from a place of enormous faith. And so he just believes that, for some reason, God is not done with him yet,” she added.
In November, he made a rare public appearance for his wife Rosalynn’s funeral, in a wheelchair and covered in a blanket representing her face.
Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter were married for 77 years and lived in the same modest home in Plains, Georgia, for decades.
Rosalynn’s funeral was the only time Carter appeared publicly since entering hospice, and his frail appearance at the service alarmed friends at church and well-wishers watching on television.
Carter spends his days in the Plains home he has owned for more than six decades, where caregivers tend to his needs and friends and family visit him.
The one-story, two-bedroom ranch home was built by Carter himself and is worth about $240,000.
Jimmy was elected to the Georgia State Senate on November 5, 1962, following an unsuccessful bid for the United States Senate.
He won the election for governor of the state of Georgia on November 3, 1970.
Jimmy won the United States presidential election on November 2, 1976, thanks in part to Rosalynn’s determined campaign strategy, which visited 40 states and earned her the title of Jimmy’s “secret weapon.”
He served a single term that was ruined by an oil crisis that forced Americans to wait in line for gas, and he was defeated by Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980.
He has since committed himself to philanthropy and lived a humble life with Rosalynn, his four children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
After his presidency, the Carters began working with Habitat for Humanity, a Christian nonprofit that builds affordable homes for those in need.
Carter receives hospice care in his one-story home in Plains, Georgia, which he built himself and has owned for six decades.
In August 2015, Carter had a small cancerous mass removed from his liver. The following year, Carter announced that she did not need further treatment, as an experimental drug had eliminated any signs of cancer.
That same year he was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma that was detected in the liver and spread to the brain.
About six months after his diagnosis, Carter announced that he no longer needed cancer treatment due in part to an innovative drug that trains the immune system to fight cancerous tumors.
He was hospitalized two years later for dehydration while building homes for Habitat for Humanity in Canada.
Despite his series of health scares, the president remained active in public life until recent times.
