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Jimmy Carter, on Death
Jimmy Carter brought up death — specifically, his own — at what turned out to be the last Sunday school class he would teach at Maranatha Baptist Church. It was November 2019. He’d recently fallen and fractured his pelvis, a setback that followed a string of illnesses and injuries that reminded everyone around him — and himself, it seems — that despite his mental acuity and physical vigor, he was 95 and would not live forever.
Mr. Carter’s death on Sunday at 100, has spurred an examination of a sprawling legacy: the successes and failures of his presidency; his work to eradicate diseases and bolster free and fair elections; his involvement with nonprofits like Habitat for Humanity.
Here is something else he left behind: In a culture where death as a subject is often taboo and engulfed in an aura of fear, he amassed over the years — across writing, public comments and Sunday school lessons — a compilation of observations that amounted to a candid, cleareyed, evolving exploration of the end.
He wrote about death in books — and he wrote more books than any other American president. He discussed it in speeches and in correspondence with friends.
Those observations were a product of his Christian faith. His perspective also grew out of experience, a fluency with death that came from seeing many of his closest family members, including all of his younger siblings, die before him.
His views were also shaped by his own advancing age. He described the sense of the inevitable looming over him and the health challenges that had piled up, including cancer that had spread to his brain.
At Sunday school that morning in 2019, he said that he did not think he would survive for long after his cancer diagnosis. “I assumed, naturally, I was going to die very quickly,” he told the packed church. He lived nine more years.
Mr. Carter atop his Shetland pony named Lady in 1928.
“By the time I was 12 or 13 years old, my anxiety about this became so intense that at the end of every prayer, until after I was an adult, before Amen I added the words ‘And, God, please help me believe in the resurrection.’”
“Living Faith,” 1996
Mr. Carter recalled the worries he had as a young person, stirred by learning in church about Jesus Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection and by the pastor’s sermons about how “all believers,” as he put it, “would someday enjoy a similar resurrection.”
“As I grew older,” Mr. Carter wrote, “I began to wonder whether this could be true.”
He was concerned as a boy that even an iota of doubt could lead him to a different fate, relegating him to an eternity separated from his family, particularly his parents. “These two people were the core of my existence,” he wrote, “and I couldn’t bear the idea that I would not be with them forever.”
Mr. Carter prayed before teaching a Sunday school in Plains, Ga.
“I realize that my physical strength and endurance are steadily declining, and I am having to learn how to conserve them, but I have found with relief and gratitude — even when facing the prospect of an early death from cancer in my liver and brain — that my faith as a Christian is still unwavering and sustaining.”
“Faith: A Journey for All,” published in 2018
As he matured, Mr. Carter’s faith firmed and came to define his approach to life — and death.
He considered himself a born-again Christian. In a 2012 interview with an influential evangelical theologian, Mr. Carter said his aim had been to “pattern my life and my own fallible human ways after Jesus’s life.”
“Faith in something,” he has written in several books, “is an inducement not to dormancy but to action.”
Mr. Carter spoke to a Sunday school class at Maranatha Baptist Church.
“If I were an amputee, for instance, my prayer would not be to restore my leg but to help me make the best of my condition, and to be thankful for life and opportunities to be a blessing to others. At the moment, we are monitoring the status of my cancer, and my prayers about my own health are similar to this.”
“Faith: A Journey for All”
In 2015, Mr. Carter said he was feeling unwell while monitoring elections in Guyana. When he returned to Georgia, doctors found a small mass on his liver, which turned out to be malignant.
After the mass was removed, doctors discovered that the cancer had spread to his brain.
The prognosis was grim, particularly given his age at the time, 90. But he began an aggressive treatment regimen for metastatic melanoma that included a drug that had been approved only months before he started on it.
Four months later, he announced at Sunday school that scans showed he was free of the disease.
Mr. Carter with his mother, Lillian Carter, in 1976.
“When other members of my family realized that they had a terminal illness, the finest medical care was available to them. But each chose to forgo elaborate artificial life-support systems and, with a few friends and family members at their bedside, they died peacefully.”
“The Virtues of Aging,” published in 1998
Mr. Carter’s understanding of mortality was anything but abstract.
His father, brother and two sisters died of pancreatic cancer. His mother, Lillian Carter, died of breast cancer. She was 85 when she died, but Mr. Carter noted that the others had died at relatively young ages — his father, James Carter Sr., was 59; his sister Gloria was 64; his sister Ruth was 54; and his brother, Billy, was 51.
His grandson, Jeremy, died in 2015 of a heart attack at the age of 28.
Mr. Carter recounted how his brother and mother kept their sense of humor, even as they suffered. He also admired the unflagging faith of his sister Ruth, an evangelist and spiritual healer.
Mr. Carter, center, at a funeral service at Arlington National Cemetery in 1996.
“If our doctors tell us that we have a terminal illness and can expect to live only another year, or five years, how would we respond? In fact, we confront exactly the same question if we are still healthy and have a life expectancy of fifteen or twenty more years.”
“The Virtues of Aging”
In his final years, Mr. Carter had become a source of inspiration to many — and of frustration and worry for those closest to him — for the stubbornness in how he pressed ahead with his work, despite his illness and age.
In 2019, he was bruised and bandaged with a black eye after a fall at home, yet hours after the fall, he was in Nashville, helping to assemble porches on homes being built by Habitat for Humanity. A few weeks later, after fracturing his pelvis in another fall, family members and aides were adamant that he should cancel his Sunday school lesson. He perched himself before the congregation and did it anyway.
That resilience was apparent again after the Carter Center announced in February 2023 that he had entered hospice care. Many believed the end was rapidly approaching. Yet, once again, Mr. Carter defied others’ expectations. He celebrated another anniversary with his wife, Rosalynn, in July of that year, and his 99th birthday in October.
When Mrs. Carter died in November 2023 at the age of 96, Mr. Carter attended her funeral services, which was a display of his frailty as well as the strength of his devotion to his wife and his resolve to be there for her.
Mr. Carter at a prayer service at Washington National Cathedral in 1979.
“Perhaps the most troubling aspect of our later years is the need to face the inevitability of our own impending physical death. For some people, this fact becomes a cause of great distress, sometimes with attendant resentment against God or even those around us.”
“The Virtues of Aging”
Aging is difficult. That’s true even for a former president with access to the best medical care and the constant support of staff.
Well into his 90s, Mr. Carter continued trotting around the world, teaching, writing and keeping up with his hobbies, including bird watching. But eventually, time caught up with him. The coronavirus pandemic pinned him down even more. He spent his final years with Mrs. Carter in the same modest home where he’d lived for decades.
In Plains, the tiny Georgia town where Mr. Carter’s house was just off the main road, his death was the cause of deep sadness. But there was a twinge of another sentiment, not quite relief but something close to it — a feeling that after such a long, productive and varied life, he had earned his rest.
His death created a void in the world, in his community, in his family, according to many who knew him and many others connected to him only through his legacy. Despite that, many in Plains also believed that his death was not an end but a transition to the eternal life that he remembered the pastor preaching about.
That’s what he believed, too.
“I’ve seen the apps and I don’t like them,” says a DHS official who left this year. “It’s rife for abuse. I imagine they’re being used in ways they were not intended.”
He highlighted the risks of misidentification, noting that facial recognition often has elevated error rates for people of colour. “I have no confidence that there’s any oversight from people who are serious and understand” the tech, he adds.
In September, ICE renewed its access to a facial recognition search engine called Clearview AI, which has been banned in some states. Earlier contracts and privacy documents state that it would be used for “child sexual exploitation cases”, but this year’s contract added “assaults against law enforcement” — which former officials fear might extend to protestors. The company declined to comment.
Clearview AI
ICE and Customs and Border Protection also collect DNA from detainees and asylum applicants, according to a privacy disclosure. One attorney says he was representing a US citizen who was given a cheek swab while incorrectly detained. Samples are stored in an FBI database where they are queryable by a range of law enforcement agencies.
ICE has also signed a contract with BI² Technologies, a vendor selling handheld eye scanners. Former officials questioned the need for the devices, noting that the agency held few, if any, iris scans to search. “My first question is why?” a former privacy official says. “What do you expect to get out of this? If they’re just out there collecting irises and biometrics, that’s a problem for me.”
BI²’s registered lobbyist, Ballard Partners, has close ties to the Trump administration, raising money for its campaign and previously employing Attorney General Pam Bondi and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.
BI² Technologies
Lobbying disclosures show that Ballard also works on behalf of a host of other tech firms doing business with ICE, including Palantir; DNA testing firm SNA International; cell-phone intercept vendor L3Harris; open-source data broker Babel Street; and the Thomson Reuters subsidiary selling Clear. Ballard declined to comment.
“They’re spending a lot of money on things they might not even use, to benefit people who are maybe close to the administration,” says Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy nonprofit monitoring ICE’s surveillance purchases. “They’re moving very fast.”
Procurement records also show that ICE has obtained tools previous administrations found problematic.
In August, ICE removed a hold on a $2mn contract with the Israeli spyware firm Paragon Solutions, which sells a phone-hacking tool called Graphite. It has been used by the Italian government to target European journalists with iMessage and WhatsApp attacks, according to researchers at CitizenLab.
The contract was paused by the Biden White House, which had banned the use of spyware sold by foreign companies with human rights concerns. Paragon was subsequently acquired by US-based private equity firm AE Industrial Partners, which also controls Department of Defense contractor REDLattice.
Pictures of National Guard members Andrew Wolfe and Sarah Beckstrom, who were shot on Nov. 26 in Washington, D.C., are displayed next to a picture of the suspect in the shooting, Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal, on the day of a news conference in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 27.
Nathan Howard/REUTERS
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Nathan Howard/REUTERS
They survived some of the Afghanistan War’s most grueling and treacherous missions, regularly battling the Taliban in nighttime raids and urban gun battles. But once evacuated to the U.S., many Afghan fighters who served in “Zero Units” led by the CIA found themselves spiraling into despair because of what they saw as bureaucratic neglect and abandonment by the U.S. government, a former CIA operative and a former Afghan fighter involved in the units told NPR.
Among their ranks was Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the man charged with killing one National Guard soldier and seriously injuring a second after opening fire on them in Washington, DC on Thanksgiving Eve.
The sense of betrayal and frustration cut so deep, some Afghan soldiers living in the U.S. began threatening self-harm.
“Unfortunately, four people took their lives,” said Davud, who served as a combat translator in a Zero Unit for more than a decade.
Davud, who lives now on the West Coast, agreed to be interviewed about the struggles of his fellow soldiers only if NPR identified him by his first name and concealed his identity. He said he fears for the safety of his family still living under Taliban rule in Afghanistan.
Despite their service to the U.S., many Zero Unit fighters have struggled to gain asylum or permanent residency in the U.S., according to Davud. He condemned Lakanwal’s alleged actions, but spoke of the overwhelming mental health and emotional challenges fighters face living in exile.
While fighting under CIA leadership, thousands of soldiers like Davud and Lakanwal faced some of the most harrowing battles of the 20-year Afghanistan war, often carrying out two or even three combat missions a night. Their tactics were often brutal, and groups like Human Rights Watch accused them of engaging in torture and illegal killings.
“I almost got killed by a grenade,” Davud told NPR, describing one firefight when an American CIA agent saved his life. “He grabbed me from my body armor and pulled me back.”
In this Aug. 22, 2021, file photo provided by the U.S. Air Force, Afghan passengers board a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III during the Afghanistan evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan.
MSgt. Donald R. Allen/U.S. Air Force via AP
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MSgt. Donald R. Allen/U.S. Air Force via AP
After being evacuated to the U.S. in 2021, when the Taliban swept into Kabul, many Zero Unit soldiers came to feel they had been abandoned by CIA officials. Despite years of service — which Davud described as “a brotherhood” — he now believes the agency failed to help his comrades navigate America’s complex immigration system.
“It’s that feeling of like you did something that nobody is appreciating,” he said. “That promise that was given to you by your employer was a fake promise.”
NPR sent detailed questions to the CIA and to the U.S. Immigration and Citizenship and Immigration Services, asking for comment. Both agencies declined to comment on the record for this story.
But many aspects of Davud’s account of growing tension and frustration among Zero Unit fighters living in the U.S. were confirmed by Geeta Bakshi, a former CIA agent who spent four years in Afghanistan.
“These guys were the tip of the spear,” Bakshi said, describing the CIA’s Afghan Zero Unit program in an interview with NPR. “They were out on the front, so that American personnel didn’t have to be. They were the ones facing the maximum danger on the battlefield.”
Bakshi now leads a refugee resettlement program, called FAMIL, that focuses on helping Zero Unit soldiers rebuild their lives inside the U.S. She says her organization grew alarmed about rising rates of self-harm among former Afghan soldiers beginning in 2023.
“Individuals from the Zero Units unfortunately suffered deaths by self-harm,” Bakshi told NPR. “We raised this issue with the Biden administration and it was one that we were very concerned about. Again, we saw a direct connection to prolonged immigration delays.”
Bakshi and Davud described struggling to help a growing number of Afghan soldiers in the U.S. who were spiraling into depression. Davud described one instance where a friend felt increasingly hopeless because his immigration status made it difficult for him to work.
“He was like, ‘I’m going to go kill myself,’ that’s how bad it was,” Davud said. “I was very worried for him, but we helped him.” That meant offering friendship, counseling, and support.
Bakshi described a separate incident where a Zero Unit fighter appeared to be unraveling because of repeated bureaucratic snafus by U.S. officials reviewing his immigration paperwork. “He was told, ‘We don’t have you in the system.’ This was a man who was in severe distress. What happened in his case is there was an error in the spelling of his name.”
That individual eventually received a Green Card, Bakshi said, adding that with proper support many Afghan soldiers are adapting well to life in America. In rare cases where Zero Unit soldiers ended their lives, the community has held memorials.
“We usually do a religious funeral for them, on their behalf, saying a prayer,” Davud said.
Lakanwal, the Zero Unit fighter accused of fatally shooting one National Guard soldier and seriously wounding another, also struggled with his immigration status. He only received asylum protection from the Trump administration in April of this year, nearly four years after coming to the U.S.
Like others who fought alongside the CIA in Afghanistan, Lakanwal appeared to be experiencing a personal crisis which began at least as early as January 2024, according to a refugee resettlement volunteer who worked with the Lakanwal family in Bellingham, Wash. Emails shared with NPR show he, too, struggled to find stable employment.
“My biggest concern was that he would harm himself,” the volunteer told NPR. “I worried he would be suicidal because he was so withdrawn.”
The volunteer spoke with NPR on condition of anonymity because they said they feared for their safety, as well as the safety of others in their volunteer community, because of possible retaliation for having worked with the Lakanwals and other Afghan refugees.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has said that U.S. officials believe Lakanwal was “radicalized” while living in the United States, but the volunteer said they saw no signs of radicalization. Noem offered no evidence that Lakanwal was radicalized.
Davud, the Zero Unit fighter, said he didn’t know Lakanwal personally. He voiced sorrow that his community of Afghan soldiers wasn’t able to help him in time.
“We had worse cases [of emotional distress] than Lakanwal but we found solutions for them,” he said.
Lakanwal has pleaded not guilty to first degree murder and other charges. In the wake of the attack in Washington, D.C., the Trump administration has frozen all Afghan asylum cases and officials say the legal status of refugees from Afghanistan living in the U.S. is being reexamined.
People pay their respects to the fallen National Guardsman outside Farragut West Metro Station in Washington, DC, on November 28, 2025.
Andrew Thomas/NurPhoto via Reuters
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Andrew Thomas/NurPhoto via Reuters
CIA director John Ratcliffe suggested in a statement that Lakanwal and his fellow soldiers weren’t properly vetted “This individual — and so many others — should have never been allowed to come here,” Ratcliffe said.
FBI director Kash Patel also said the Biden administration failed to properly vet “in any way, shape or form this individual and countless others.”
That account was disputed by Davud., and Biden administration officials who said the Afghans underwent rigorous vetting.
“What they said about Mr. Lakanwal wasn’t vetted? We were all vetted,” he said, describing years of scrutiny, including polygraph tests and detailed interviews by the CIA and other federal agencies, in Afghanistan and in the United States.
“We worked with them for twenty years,” Davud said. “I was really shocked by the CIA director’s comment. I felt so betrayed.”
If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of suicide, you can dial or text 988 and be connected to help.
new video loaded: Prosecutors Release Body Camera Footage of Luigi Mangione’s Arrest
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Prosecutors Release Body Camera Footage of Luigi Mangione’s Arrest
The footage shows officers confronting Luigi Mangione at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pa. Lawyers for Mr. Mangione, who is accused of killing the former C.E.O. of UnitedHealthcare, argued that the evidence recovered at his arrest should not be admitted into trial, as it was obtained without a warrant.
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“What’s your name?” “Mark.” “What is it?” “Mark.” “Mark?” “Yes, sir.” “Mark what?” “Rosario.” “Someone called, they thought you were suspicious.” “Oh, I’m sorry.” “Hey, sir. How are you doing?” “Pull your mask down real quick for me.” “Yes, sure.” “Appreciate it. Thank you. What’s your name?” “Mark.” “What is it?” “Mark.” “Mark?” “Yes, sir.” “Mark what” “Rosario.” “Someone called, they thought you were suspicious.” “Oh, I’m sorry.” “Do you have your ID on you?” “Yes, sir.” “Thanks. Thought you looked like someone.”
By Jamie Leventhal
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