Jimmy Carter moved to hospice care after multiple hospital trips

Former President Jimmy Carter, 98, has decided to receive hospice care at his home instead of continuing to medically fight an illness that threatens his life, his charity organization said Saturday.

Carter, the 39th American president and a one-time Georgia peanut farmer, made a “series of short hospital stays” recently, the Carter Center said in a statement.

The organization did not say why the Democrat had been in and out of the hospital.

“Jimmy Carter today decided to spend his remaining time at home with his family and receive hospice care instead of additional medical intervention,” the nonprofit said in its statement. “He has the full support of his family and his medical team.”

Carter has lived longer than any other U.S. president. He earned that distinction in 2019 when he reached 94 years and 172 days old.

“The Carter family asks for privacy during this time and is grateful for the concern shown by his many admirers,” the Carter Center said.

In October, Carter celebrated his 98th birthday with a parade in his hometown of Plains, Ga.

“He’s still 100% with it, even though daily life things are a lot harder now,” his grandson Jason Carter said at the time, citing Rosalynn Carter, the 95-year-old former first lady, as a source of strength for Jimmy Carter.

“He has outlived friends and so many of his advisers and the people that he accomplished so much with in the past,” said the grandson, “but they’ve never been lonely because they’ve always had each other.”

The former president had several health scares in recent years. In 2015, Carter revealed that he had been battling melanoma.

“I didn’t think I was going to live but two or three weeks,” he said of the diagnosis. “After that, when they did an MRI, they found four cancer places in my brain, so I thought I just had a few weeks to live.”

But seven months after his announcement, Carter’s condition had progressed to the point that he did not need his medication anymore.

In late 2019, he underwent brain surgery to relieve pressure caused by a series of falls. That same year, he was treated for a urinary tract infection.

Carter’s concession to those ailments was to give up teaching his weekly Sunday School class at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains.

“It’s hard to live until you’re 95 years old,” Carter told People magazine in 2019. “I think the best explanation for that is to marry the best spouse: someone who will take care of you and engage and do things to challenge you and keep you alive and interested in life.”