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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.
Dr. Tyler Jorgensen sets “A Charlie Brown Christmas” on a record player at Dell Seton Medical Center in Austin Texas. He uses vinyl records as a form of music therapy for palliative care patients.
Lorianne Willett/KUT News
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AUSTIN, TEXAS — Lying in her bed at Dell Seton Medical Center at the University of Texas at Austin, 64-year-old Pamela Mansfield sways her feet to the rhythm of George Jones’ “She Thinks I Still Care.” Mansfield is still recovering much of her mobility after a recent neck surgery, but she finds a way to move to the music floating from a record player that was wheeled into her room.
“Seems to be the worst part is the stiffness in my ankles and the no feeling in the hands,” she says. “But music makes everything better.”
The record player is courtesy of the ATX-VINyL program, a project dreamed up by Dr. Tyler Jorgensen to bring music to the bedside of patients dealing with difficult diagnoses and treatments. He collaborates with a team of volunteers who wheel the player on a cart to patients’ rooms, along with a selection of records in their favorite genres.
“I think of this record player as a time machine,” he said. “You know, something starts spinning — an old, familiar song on a record player — and now you’re back at home, you’re out of the hospital, you’re with your family, you’re with your loved ones.”
Daniela Vargas, a volunteer for the ATX-VINyL program, wheels a record player to the hospital room of a palliative care patient in Austin, Texas.
Lorianne Willett/KUT News
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The healing power of Country music… and Thin Lizzy
Mansfield wanted to hear country music: Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, George Jones. That genre reminds her of listening to records with her parents, who helped form her taste in music. Almost as soon as the first record spins, she starts cracking jokes.
“I have great taste in music. Men, on the other hand … ehhh. I think my picker’s broken,” she says.
Other patients ask for jazz, R&B or holiday records.
The man who gave Jorgensen the idea for ATX-VINyL loved classic rock. That was around three years ago, when Jorgensen, a long-time emergency medicine physician, began a fellowship in palliative care — a specialty aimed at improving quality of life for people with serious conditions, including terminal illnesses.
Shortly after he began the fellowship, he says he struggled to connect with a particular patient.
“I couldn’t draw this man out, and I felt like he was really struggling and suffering,” Jorgensen said.
He had the idea to try playing the patient some music.
He went with “The Boys Are Back in Town,” by the 1970s Irish rock group Thin Lizzy, and saw an immediate change in the patient.
“He was telling me old stories about his life. He was getting more honest and vulnerable about the health challenges he was facing,” Jorgensen said. “And it just struck me that all this time I’ve been practicing medicine, there’s such a powerful tool that is almost universal to the human experience, which is music, and I’ve never tapped into it.”
Dr. Tyler Jorgensen plays vinyl records as a form of music therapy for palliative care patients in Austin, Texas. Willie Nelson’s albums are a perennial hit.
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Creating new memories
Jorgensen realized records could lift the spirits of patients dealing with heavy circumstances in hospital spaces that are often aesthetically bare. And he thought vinyl would offer a more personal touch than streaming a digital track through a smartphone or speaker.
“There’s just something inherently warm about the friction of a record — the pops, the scratches,” he said. “It sort of resonates through the wooden record player, and it just feels different.”
Since then, he has built up a collection of 60 records and counting at the hospital. The most-requested album, by a landslide, is Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours from 1977. Willie is also popular, along with Etta James and John Denver. And around the holidays, the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s A Charlie Brown Christmas gets a lot of spins.
These days, it’s often a volunteer who rolls the record player from room to room after consulting nursing staff about patients and family members who are struggling and could use a visit.
Daniela Vargas, the UT Austin pre-med undergraduate who heads up the volunteer cohort, became passionate about music therapy years ago when she and her sister began playing violin for isolated patients during the COVID-19 pandemic. She said she sees similar benefits when she curates a collection of records for a patient today.
“We are usually not in the room for the entire time, so it’s a more intimate experience for the patient or family, but being able to interact with the patient in the beginning and at the end can be really transformative,” Vargas said.
Often, the palliative care patients visited by ATX-VINyL are near the end of life.
Jorgensen feels that the record player provides an interruption of the heaviness those patients and their families are experiencing. Suddenly, it’s possible to create a new, positive shared experience at a profoundly difficult time.
“Now you’re sort of looking at it together and thinking, ‘What are we going to do with this thing? Let’s play something for Mom, let’s play something for Dad.’” he said. “And you are creating a new, positive, shared experience in the setting of something that can otherwise be very sad, very heavy.”
Other patients, like Pamela Mansfield, are working painstakingly toward recovery.
She has had six neck surgeries since April, when she had a serious fall. But on the day she listened to the George Jones album, she had a small victory to celebrate: She stood up for three minutes, a record since her most recent surgery.
With the record spinning, she couldn’t help but think about the victories she’s still pursuing.
“It’s motivating,” she said. “Me and my broom could dance really well to some of this stuff.”
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By Caroline Kitchener, Melanie Bencosme, Karen Hanley, June Kim and Pierre Kattar
December 22, 2025
After prolonged heavy rainfall and devastating flooding across the Pacific north-west in the past few weeks, further flood watches have been issued across California through this week.
With 50-75mm (2-3in) of rainfall already reported across northern California this weekend, a series of atmospheric rivers will continue to bring periods of heavy rain and mountain snow across the northern and central parts of the state, with flood watches extending until Friday.
Cumulative rainfall totals are expected to widely exceed 50mm (2in) across a vast swathe of California by Boxing Day, but with totals around 200-300mm (8-12in) possible for the north-western corner of California and western-facing slopes of the northern Sierra Nevada mountains.
Los Angeles could receive 100-150mm (4-6in) of rainfall between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, which could make it one of the wettest Christmases on record for the city. River and urban flooding are likely – particularly where there is run-off from high ground – with additional risks of mudslides and rockslides in mountain and foothill areas.
Winter storm warnings are also in effect for Yosemite national park, with the potential for 1.8-2.4 metres (6-8ft) of accumulating snow by Boxing Day. Heavy snow alongside strong winds will make travel very difficult over the festive period.
Heavy rain, lightning and strong winds are forecast across large parts of Zimbabwe leading up to Christmas. A level 2 weather warning has been issued by the Meteorological Services Department from Sunday 21 December to Wednesday 24 December. Some areas are expected to see more than 50mm of rainfall within a 24-hour period. The rain will be accompanied by hail, frequent lightning, and strong winds. These conditions have been attributed to the interaction between warm, moist air with low-pressure systems over the western and northern parts of the country.
Australia will see some large variations in temperatures over the festive period. Sydney, which is experiencing temperatures above 40C, is expected to tumble down to about 22C by Christmas Day, about 5C below average for this time of year. Perth is going to see temperatures gradually creep up, reaching a peak of 40C around Christmas Day. This is about 10C above average for this time of year.
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