Former President Jimmy Carter is not afraid of death.
As the oldest living former president, his thoughts on dying — shared after surviving a dire cancer diagnosis — offer a glimpse into how he views end-of-life care.
At a church service in late 2019, the then-95-year-old said that when he learned he had cancer in 2015 — and that it had already spread to his brain — he figured he was "going to die very quickly."
"I obviously prayed about it. I didn't ask God to let me live, but I asked God to give me a proper attitude toward death. And I found that I was absolutely and completely at ease with death," Carter said in 2019, according to CNN.
He added: "It didn't really matter to me whether I died or lived. Except I was going to miss my family and miss the work at the Carter Center, and miss teaching your Sunday school service sometimes, and so forth. All those delightful things."
The nation's 39th president ended up cancer-free in just four months after undergoing an experimental treatment and went on to continue working for Habitat for Humanity and the Carter Center.
Carter still regularly spoke and taught Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, well into his 90s.
On Saturday, February 18, 2023, the Carter Center released a statement saying the now-98-year-old had chosen to stop receiving medical intervention and receive hospice care after "a series of short hospital stays" and "has the full support of his family and his medical team."
He and his wife Rosalynn, 95, also hold the record for the longest-married presidential couple. They grew up together in Plains, and Rosalynn's younger sister was even named in honor of Jimmy's mother, Lillian.
Carter's health began declining in recent years, including sustaining injuries falling in his home twice in 2019. The first fall required stitches to his forehead, but he was back to work building houses for Habitat for Humanity the next day. The second fall was more serious, and involved a minor pelvic fracture, CNN reported.
