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Jimmy Carter, on Death

Published

3 days ago

December 30, 2024

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.

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New Orleans Attacker Evaded a Security System Under Repair

Published

55 minutes ago

January 2, 2025

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Bollards that normally protect pedestrians from vehicles were to be replaced as part of the city’s preparations for the Super Bowl next month. The attacker drove his pickup around a police vehicle parked to block traffic from the street he struck.

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Shipowners switch to smaller vessels as world trade reroutes from China

Published

2 hours ago

January 2, 2025

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Shipowners switch to smaller vessels as world trade reroutes from China

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The rerouting of global trade from China to ports elsewhere in Asia is leading shipowners to move on from the era of ordering ever-larger vessels and switch to smaller crafts instead.

Just six container ships capable of carrying the equivalent of more than 17,000 20-foot containers, known in industry parlance as TEUs, are due to be delivered in 2025, against 17 delivered in 2020, according to shipbroker Braemar.

At the same time, 83 mid-sized vessels measuring between 12,000 TEUs and 16,999 TEUs are set to be completed in 2025, almost five times the number five years earlier.

“The 16,000-TEU ship will become the popular workhorse for liner companies,” said Jonathan Roach, container market analyst at Braemar, who added that “tepid” global trade and a saturation of “massive ships” had also reduced the appetite for these vessels.

The threat of environmental regulations and trade disruptions — including last year’s attacks on ships in the Red Sea — have also hit demand for the bulkiest carriers, said industry insiders.

That disruption is expected to continue with Donald Trump’s return to the White House this month. The incoming president has threatened to turbocharge tariffs on imports from China.

“We definitely see increased interest away from sourcing only your products from China,” said Peter Sand, chief analyst at shipping market tracker Xeneta, who added that supply chains were spreading to smaller manufacturing hubs elsewhere in Asia.

Sand added: “You can only make economic sense out of ships [of the largest] size if you have got the cargo to fill that up. If you don’t, you are losing money.”

A senior executive at one of Asia’s biggest container shipping lines echoed Sand’s remarks. With manufacturing shifting to India and Vietnam, “it probably makes less sense to expect the largest vessels [to be] filled up in two or three ports”, he said.

The shift follows decades of shipowners ordering ever-larger vessels as global trade boomed — a trend that came to widespread attention when the 220,000-tonne, 20,000-TEU Ever Given ship ran aground and blocked the Suez Canal for six days in 2021.

A satellite image showing the MV Ever Given container ship being aided by tugboats as it navigates through the Suez Canal. — Tugboats push the Ever Given container ship in the Suez Canal © Maxar Tech/AFP via Getty Images

While mid-sized ships had overtaken the largest in popularity, demand for vessels bigger than 18,000 TEU had picked up again as profits in the container shipping industry soared in 2024.

Seventy-six ships of this size were on order at the start of December, compared with 45 at the same point in 2023, according to Braemar. Mediterranean Shipping Company, the industry leader, alone ordered 10 ships measuring 21,000 TEU in September, according to reports in the shipping trade press.

Shipowners’ earnings have surged after Yemen’s Houthi militant group launched a flurry of attacks on vessels near the Suez Canal, leading liners to divert ships and driving up the cost of shipping as the supply of available vessels dwindled.

But experts said the attacks, launched in a demonstration of support for Palestinians during the war in Gaza, had only emphasised the growing importance of flexibility in the industry.

Ultra-large ships are predominantly used to ferry large Asia-Europe trades through the Suez Canal but would struggle to transit other critical passages such as the Panama Canal.

“The shutting of the Suez Canal has had a serious impact on container shipping,” said William MacLachlan, a partner at law firm HFW who advises clients on shipbuilding. “Smaller ships can respond to macroeconomic events more readily.”

He also pointed to considerable uncertainty over which fuel future ships should be built to run on, with limited supplies of green alternatives.

Shipowners are also unsure about what requirements the International Maritime Organization, the industry regulator, will set to achieve its target of net zero emissions by about 2050.

“I suspect smaller shipowners are thinking: can I justify that investment [in an ultra-large ship]?” said MacLachlan. “The smaller cost of the smaller ships means people are probably less concerned.”

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Power is restored to nearly all of Puerto Rico after a major blackout

Published

3 hours ago

January 2, 2025

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Power is restored to nearly all of Puerto Rico after a major blackout

A utility pole with loose cables is shown towering over a home in Loiza, Puerto Rico, Sept. 15, 2022.

Alejandro Granadillo/AP

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Alejandro Granadillo/AP

BAYAMÓN, Puerto Rico — Power was restored to nearly all electrical customers across Puerto Rico on Wednesday after a sweeping blackout plunged the U.S. territory into darkness on New Year’s Eve.

By Wednesday afternoon, power was back up for 98% of Puerto Rico’s 1.47 million utility customers, said Luma Energy, the private company overseeing transmission and distribution of power in the archipelago. Lights returned to households as well as to Puerto Rico’s hospitals, water plants and sewage facilities after the massive outage that exposed the persistent electricity problems plaguing the island.

Still, the company warned that customers could still see temporary outages in the coming days. It said full restoration across the island could take up to two days.

“Given the fragile nature of the grid, we will need to manage available generation to customer demand, which will likely require rotating temporary outages,” Juan Saca, president of Luma Energy, said in a statement.

The lights went off in Puerto Rico at 5:30 a.m. on Tuesday, darkening almost the entire archipelago as people prepared to ring in the New Year. Authorities are still investigating the cause of the outage, but Luma Energy said a preliminary review pointed to a failure in an underground electric line in the south of the territory.

Governor-elect Jenniffer González Colón, who is set to take office on Thursday, warned that customers might experience interruptions in the coming days, with power plants not yet operating at maximum capacity.

“These days, I urge you to be moderate with your energy consumption to help reduce load shifting, so that more people can have access to electricity and the system can start up without any major setbacks,” González Colón said on social media platform X.

On the campaign trail, González Colón had promised to appoint an “energy czar” to oversee the operation of the power grid, which has long been fragile and faulty due to years of neglect.

The island’s power grid was ravaged in September 2017 by Hurricane Maria, a Category 4 storm.

Unreliable electricity remains frustratingly common, hindering daily life for Puerto Ricans. In June, over 340,000 customers were left without electricity as people reeled from soaring temperatures. At the peak of Hurricane Ernesto, in August, over half of all utility customers lost power. Tens of thousands of people remained without electricity a week after the storm.

The New Year’s Eve outage came as clients brace for a hike in electricity rates. Last month, Puerto Rico’s Energy Bureau approved an increase of 2.2 cents per kilowatt hour for residential customers from January through March, causing electric bills for the average household to jump by nearly $20, the Energy Bureau says.