Jimmy Carter is ‘at home, enjoying peanut butter ice cream,’ said the CEO of the 99-year-old’s non-profit, days after his grandson warned that the former president’s life was ‘coming to the end.’
Carter Center CEO Paige Alexander said on The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Politically Georgia podcast Wednesday that ‘there really hasn’t been a significant change’ in the ex-president’s health.
The Georgia peanut farmer and oldest living president has been in hospice care for more than a year after deciding to forego any further medical treatment.
‘I mean, he will always be one bad cold away from the end,’ Alexander told the podcast. ‘He is in hospice care, and there are palliative measures if he’s in pain, but nothing else.’
‘He is just the same remarkable man. He has always been outliving and surprising us all,’ Alexander added.
Jimmy Carter is ‘at home, enjoying peanut butter ice cream,’ said the CEO of the 99-year-old’s non-profit, days after his grandson warned that the former president’s life was ‘coming to the end’
Jason Carter said at a mental health forum on Tuesday: ‘(My grandfather) is doing OK’ but warned that his life was ‘coming to the end’
While Jason Carter warned that his grandfather’s death could be imminent he also told a crowd at a mental health froum on Tuesday that ‘he is doing OK.’
‘He has been in hospice, as you know, for almost a year and a half now, and he really is, I think, coming to the end that, as I’ve said before, there’s a part of this faith journey that is so important to him, and there’s a part of that faith journey that you only can live at the very end and I think he has been there in that space,’ Jason Carter said.
The ex-president 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 rare public appearance for his wife Rosalynn’s memorial service, in a wheelchair and covered in a blanket depicting 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 77nd wedding anniversary on July 7, 2023.
Family members say that he was determined to hang on even after entering hospice care, in part to ensure that Rosalynn was never left alone.
‘He was really honored and glad that he made it to the end with my grandmother, and that was a real treasure for him,’ Jason Carter told the New York Times in February.
‘I think that for whatever reason, the way he approaches this is from a place of enormous faith. And so he just believes that for whatever reason, God’s not done with him yet,’ he added.
In November, he made rare public appearance for his wife Rosalynn’s memorial service, in a wheelchair and covered in a blanket depicting 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 has appeared publicly since entering hospice, and his frail appearance at the service alarmed friends in the church and well-wishers watching on television.
Carter spends his days in the home in Plains that he has owned for more than six decades, where caregivers attend to his needs and friends and family visit.
The two-bedroom, one-story ranch house was built by Carter himself, and is worth about $240,000.
Carter was elected to the Georgia state Senate on November 5, 1962, following an unsuccessful run for U.S. Senate.
He became Georgia’s governor on November 3, 1970.
Carter won the U.S. presidential election on November 2, 1976, thanks in part to Rosalynn’s determined campaign strategy, visiting 40 states and earning her the title of ‘secret weapon.’
He served a single term that was blighted by an oil crisis that forced Americans to wait in line for gas and was defeated by Republican President Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Since then he has committed himself to philanthropy and living a humble life with Rosalynn, his four children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
After his presidency, the Carters started working with Habitat for Humanity, a Christian nonprofit that builds affordable houses for those in need
Carter is receiving 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 he needed no further treatment, as an experimental drug had eliminated any sign of cancer.
That same year, he was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma that was detected in his liver and spread to his brain.
About six months after the diagnosis, Carter announced he no longer needed cancer treatment due in part to a groundbreaking medication that trains the immune system to fight cancer tumors.
He was hospitalized two years later for dehydration while building homes with Habitat for Humanity in Canada.
Despite his series of health scares, the president remained active in public life up until recent times.
President Joe Biden went to see Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter at their home in Plains, Georgia in April 2021, several months after he was sworn in, after the couple was unable to make it to the Democrat’s inauguration.
