Former President Jimmy Carter, who at 98 years old is the longest-lived American president, has entered home hospice care in Plains, Georgia, a statement from The Carter Center confirmed Saturday.
After a series of short hospital stays, the statement said, Carter “decided to spend his remaining time at home with his family and receive hospice care instead of additional medical intervention.”
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“I’m perfectly at ease with whatever comes,” Carter said after his 2015 cancer diagnosis. “I’ve had an exciting, adventurous and gratifying existence.”
The statement said the 39th president has the full support of his medical team and family, which “asks for privacy at this time and is grateful for the concern shown by his many admirers.”
Top U.S. officials have been wishing Carter a comfortable experience at home. The chief spokesman for the Secret Service promised to be “forever by your side.”
Take a look —
Rest easy Mr. President. We will be forever by your side. https://t.co/IhpZEvIUUL
— Anthony Guglielmi (@SecretSvcSpox) February 18, 2023
I saw both of my grandparents yesterday. They are at peace and—as always—their home is full of love. Thank you all for your kind words https://t.co/9rhG61sZEV
— Jason Carter (@SenatorCarter) February 18, 2023
Carter was a little-known Georgia governor when he began his bid for the presidency ahead of the 1976 election. He went on to defeat then-President Gerald R. Ford, capitalizing as a Washington outsider in the wake of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal that drove Richard Nixon from office in 1974.
Carter served a single, tumultuous term and was defeated by Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980, a landslide loss. He presided over the Iran hostage crisis, the early 1980s recession, and the Second Oil Shock. He never even appointed anyone to the Supreme Court.
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For years after his loss, Carter largely receded from electoral politics. Republicans made him a punchline, caricaturing him as a hapless liberal. Meanwhile, Democrats were hesitant to embrace him, and the late Sen. Ted Kennedy even challenged him in 1980’s Democratic primaries.
However, Carter earned greater approval for his post-presidential philanthropy, including his global advocacy for democracy, public health and human rights via The Carter Center.
The former president and his wife, Rosalynn, 95, opened the center in 1982. His work there garnered a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
Carter credits his Baptist mores with ensuring the longevity of his organization. “My faith demands – this is not optional – my faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I can, whenever I can, for as long as I can with whatever I have to try to make a difference,” he reportedly said.
Jason Carter, the couple’s grandson who now chairs The Carter Center governing board, said Saturday in a tweet that he “saw both of my grandparents yesterday. They are at peace and—as always—their home is full of love.”
Carter, who has lived most of his life in Plains, traveled extensively into his 80s and early 90s, including annual trips to build homes with Habitat for Humanity and frequent trips abroad as part of the Carter Center’s election monitoring and its effort to eradicate the Guinea worm parasite in developing countries.
But the former president’s health has declined over his 10th decade of life, especially as the coronavirus pandemic limited his public appearances, including at his beloved Maranatha Baptist Church where he taught Sunday School lessons for decades before standing-room-only crowds of visitors.
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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.
Carter celebrated his most recent birthday in October with family and friends in Plains, the tiny town where he and Rosalynn were born in the years between World War I and the Great Depression.
The Carter Center last year marked 40 years of promoting its human rights agenda.
Despite the former president’s toleration of autocrats in Asia, The Center has been a pioneer of election observation, monitoring at least 113 elections in Africa, Latin America, and Asia since 1989. In perhaps its most widely hailed public health effort, the organization recently announced that only 14 human cases of Guinea worm disease were reported in all of 2021, the result of years of public health campaigns to improve access to safe drinking water in Africa.
That’s a staggering drop from when The Carter Center began leading the global eradication effort in 1986, when the parasitic disease infected 3.5 million people. Carter once said he hoped to live longer than the last Guinea worm parasite.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.