There’s “really been no change” in recent months in the condition of former US president Jimmy Carter, who is currently in hospice care, accrording to his grandson Jason.
Carter told Southern Living his grandfather seems to be in good spirits, but is facing a new phase of life without his wife, former first lady Rosalynn Carter, by her side. She died in November.
“After 77 years of marriage… I just think none of us really understand what it’s like for him right now,” Jason Carter told the magazine. “We have to embrace that fact, that there’s things about the spirit that you just can’t understand.”
In the interview, published Friday, he recounted a recent conversation in which he asked the former president what to say about how he is doing.
“And he kind of smiled and he said ‘I don’t know, myself,’” Jason Carter remembered.
The former president’s grandson added that the fact that Carter is receiving hospice care in his beloved hometown of Plains, Georgia, must be a comfort.
“I think the fact that he and my grandmother both came from that small town—it’s a 600 person village, really—and it’s not near any interstate and it is truly out in the country and it is a fundamental part of who he is and who he has been for his whole life,” he said “There is no other place in the world that he would be at peace other than Plains.”
In November, Jimmy Carter appeared for the first time in public since entering hospice care, when he attended Rosalynn Carter’s funeral.
At almost 100 Jimmy Carter is the oldest living former US president.
Since the funeral, family members have been giving positive updates about the former president’s condition.
“(My grandfather) is doing OK,” Jason Carter told an audience at the Rosalynn Carter Symposium on Mental Health Policy last month. “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.”
