Former President Jimmy Carter, who has been in hospice care since February, said goodbye to his beloved wife Rosalynn Carter while attending her memorial service at the Glenn Memorial United Methodist Church at the Emory University Campus in Atlanta, Georgia on Tuesday.
The late first lady, whose dementia diagnosis was first disclosed in May of this year, passed away aged 96 on November 19.
The former presidential power couple were married for 77 years, the longest marriage of any president in US history, and together they took on the longest and most active post-presidential roles through their humanitarian work after leaving the White House in 1981.
Shortly before the memorial service started, Carter, 99, was brought into the church in his wheelchair, and sat next to his daughter Amy Carter, plus President Joe Biden, First Lady Jill Biden, and fellow former presidents and first ladies Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, and Melania Trump. Vice President Kamala Harris was also in attendance.
ABC News reports that along with his children – he and his wife shared kids Jack, 75, James, 72, Donnel, 70, and Amy, 55 – Carter was accompanied by his personal physician.
The outlet also noted that Carter had a new suit made on Monday for the Tuesday memorial service; he was also covered in a blanket embroidered with a portrait of him and Mrs. Carter. Her funeral will take place Wednesday at Maranatha Baptist Church in their hometown of Plains, Georgia.
Jack, the eldest Carter son – who goes by Chip – was the first to speak at the service, and started his emotional tribute with: "My mother was the glue that held our family together, through the ups and downs and thicks and thins or our family's politics."
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He continued: "As an individual, she believed in us, and took care of us," and candidly noted she "saved" his life as he recalled her influence in getting him to rehab during his struggles with alcohol and drug addiction.
Further describing his late mom as his "hero," Chip also remembered his mom's notorious – and at the time often chided – penchant for being involved in her husband's presidency and policy decisions.
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After her husband became president in 1977, Mrs. Carter quickly became the most politically active first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt. While Carter himself famously claimed to not be a politician at heart, his wife was, and together they became a package deal for the White House. Carter described her as "an almost equal extension of myself."
Their remarkable partnership, defined by their "weekly working lunch to discuss policy," per the New York Times, and their decades of humanitarian work, dates back not to their 1946 nuptials but rather to 1927, when Mrs. Carter was born.
Delivered by none other than her future husband's mother Lillian Carter, who was a nurse, Mrs. Carter met Mr. Carter when she was just days old, when his mother brought him to her family's Plains home, and he "peeked into the cradle to see the newest baby on the street," per his 2015 memoir, A Full Life, Reflections at Ninety.
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