Former President Jimmy Carter hasn’t seen any “significant change” in his health, despite his grandson warning again this week that the 99-year-old’s life was “coming to the end,” according to the director of the former commander in chief’s namesake nonprofit organization.
Carter remains “at home, enjoying peanut butter ice cream and getting the food he wants any time he wants it,” Carter Center CEO Paige Alexander told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Politically Georgia podcast Wednesday.
“It’s 15 months of hospice at this point, and he is fully retired,” Alexander explained. “There really hasn’t been a significant change. I mean, he will always be one bad cold away from the end.
“He is in hospice care, and there are palliative measures if he’s in pain, but nothing else.”
The 39th president’s family and the Carter Center announced in February of last year that Jimmy Carter would undergo end-of-life care at his Plains, Ga., home rather than suffer “additional medical intervention.”
Carter’s late wife, Rosalynn, was revealed in November to be undergoing hospice care, passing away at the age of 96 two days after her condition was made public.
Jimmy Carter has not been seen publicly since attending memorial and funeral services for his wife of 77 years.
“He is just the same remarkable man,” Alexander added Wednesday. “He has always been outliving and surprising us all.”
Alexander’s upbeat status report came one day after a more solemn assessment from the president’s grandson, Jason.
“My grandfather is doing OK. He has been in hospice, as you know, for some — almost a year and a half now,” Jason Carter said at the 28th Rosalynn Carter Georgia Mental Health Forum.
“And he really is, I think, coming to the end that, 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.”
Carter is both the oldest living former US president and the longest-lived chief executive in American history.
The Georgia native will celebrate his 100th birthday Oct.1.
