Jimmy Carter, America’s 39th President, has entered hospice care at his Plains, Georgia home, The Carter Center confirmed on Saturday.
“After a series of short hospital stays, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter today decided to spend his remaining time at home with his family and receive hospice care instead of additional medical intervention,” The Carter Center said in a statement. “He has the full support of his family and his medical team. The Carter family asks for privacy during this time and is grateful for the concern shown by his many admirers.”
The 98-year-old Carter is probably as well known for his post-Presidency diplomatic and charity work as he is for his 1977-1981 term in the Oval Office. Via The Carter Center, he has taken part in the monitoring of at least 113 elections in Africa, Latin America, and Asia since 1989.
In 1984, Carter joined Habitat for Humanity, an organization founded in 1976 that in its first 40 years built more than 70,000 new homes for those in need and rehabbed or repaired another 100,000 homes through its disaster response and recovery efforts.
In response to the Carter Center’s announcement, Habitat for Humanity said in a statement, “We pray for his comfort and for their peace, and that the Carter family experiences the joy of their relationships with each other and with God in this time.”
In an emotionally charged announcement on August 12, 2015 with his wife Rosalynn by his side, Carter had revealed that he had a mass removed from his liver and that he’d been diagnosed with that had spread. It later emerged that melanoma spots had reached his brain.
And yet by December of that same year at age 91, Carter was able to announce that he was cancer-free. Several months later he confessed that he’d thought at the time of his diagnosis that he only had “two or three weeks to live.”
Carter taught Sunday school at Marantha Baptist Church in his hometown of Plains for some 40 years before retiring for that duty in 2020 when Covid struck.
Eight years ago, Carter published his autobiography, “A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety.” He and Rosalynn have been married more than 76 years.
