President Biden on Monday revealed that former President Carter, who is in hospice care, asked him to deliver his funeral eulogy.
The Carter Center on February 18 confirmed that the 98-year-old had checked into hospice at his Plains, Georgia home.
Biden told donors at a Rancho Santa Fe, California fundraiser Monday evening that he’d recently visited the 39th President, whom Biden has known since he was a young lawmaker in Delaware in 1976 and backed Carter’s presidential campaign.
“He asked me to do his eulogy,” Biden said before stopping himself from elaborating. “Excuse me, I shouldn’t say that.”
The longest-living former President, Carter’s family has not disclosed details of his condition, though Biden alluded to Carter’s 2015 cancer diagnosis and subsequent recovery.
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 cancer 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 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. According to 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, the Carters joined Habitat for Humanity. As volunteers in what became known as the Carter Work Project, the former President and First Lady worked on job sites in 14 countries alongside more than 100,000 amateur builders. All told, the former First Couple built, renovated or repaired more than 4,390 homes.
The current President and First Lady Jill Biden visited the Carters at their Georgia home in 2021, a few months after Biden took office.
Eight years ago, Carter published his autobiography, “A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety.” He and Rosalynn have been married more than 76 years.
