Former President Jimmy Carter is “coming to the end,” his grandson solemnly announced Tuesday.
Speaking at the 28th Rosalynn Carter Georgia Mental Health Forum, Jason Carter said he recently visited with the oldest living former commander in chief.
“People ask me how you’re doing,” Jason Carter told the crowd he asked the one-time peanut farmer as they watched an Atlanta Braves game on television.
“And I say, ‘I don’t know.’ And he said, ‘Well, I don’t know myself.’”
Jason Carter, the chair of the board of trustees for the Carter Center, was speaking about the importance of the global charity’s work Tuesday when he suddenly pivoted to his personal reflections about his grandparents.
Jimmy Carter, 99, has been living in his Georgia home in hospice care since February 2023. His wife of 77 years, Rosalynn Carter, had joined him in the end-of-life care until her death in November.
According to Jason Carter, the 39th US president appears to be well considering the circumstances but is nearing the end of his journey.
“My grandfather is doing OK. He has been in hospice, as you know, for almost a year and a half now,” Jason Carter said.
“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.”
It’s not the first time Jason Carter has uttered the ominous statement.
In November, he speculated that his grandfather was “coming to the end” ahead of Rosalynn’s funeral.
The grandson even pointed out that Jimmy Carter was “very, very physically diminished” at the time — as seen by his frail state at the services.
Rosalynn was buried on a plot the couple will share, visible from the front porch of the home they built in Plains before Jimmy Carter’s first political campaign in 1962.
“The outpouring of love and support that we as a family received from the people in this room and from the rest of the world, was so remarkable and meaningful to us,” he said of celebrating his grandmother’s life and legacy.
Jimmy Carter, who is five months out from celebrating a centennial birthday, has already survived metastatic brain and liver cancer.