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Carter's Crowning Achievement?


Americans have always been captivated by the manner and meaning of their Presidents’ deaths.

The assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy shocked the nation, all the more because each coincided with the proliferation of new forms of mass communication. As the historian Richard Wightman Fox has demonstrated, advances in photography fueled widespread obsession with Lincoln's corpse, allowing people from across the nation to imagine that they were peering into an open casket.   Similarly, the perpetual television re-broadcast of Abraham Zapruder’s home-movie caused millions of Americans to feel as if they had personally witnessed JFK being gunned down in Dallas.

But this tradition is rooted in more than mere morbid fascination – a mysterious mix of popular culture, national identity and presidential mortality stretches back to the origins of the Republic.  

When Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on July 4, 1826 – 50 years to the day from their signing of the Declaration of Independence – preachers and newspaper editors across the nation proclaimed it a divinely orchestrated farewell to the nation's founding generation.

And earlier, when George Washington died as the 18th century came to a close, Americans memorialized their fallen hero not just with quasi-monarchical funeral rites, but also with an outpouring of sentiment in memorial sermons, commemorative portraits and memorabilia, children’s books and more. Washington himself had once written, “At best I have only been an instrument in the hands of Providence," and in the wake of his death people attached this understanding to the new nation itself, launching a tradition of civil religion which remains influential to this day.

Perhaps former President Jimmy Carter has this tradition in mind as he approaches the end of his life.  In the past six months, Carter has afforded the public a surprisingly detailed account of his battle with cancer – in August he announced that that the melanoma first identified in his liver had spread to his brain and, in all probability, to other parts of his body; in December he reported that treatments had rendered his body, for the moment, “cancer-free.” Through it all, he has declared himself “completely at ease” and “ready for anything.” His humor, grace and calm assurance are utterly convincing.  

Only time will tell what meaning Americans will attach to the death of Jimmy Carter.  Will he be remembered most for the peace-making work of his internationally-acclaimed Carter Center?  As a symbol of a bygone era in American politics when a humble and pious man could still win the Oval Office?   For his volunteer work with Habitat for Humanity or his weekly ritual of teaching Bible Study at his little church in Plains, Georgia?

For my part, I’m hoping the dignified elegance with which President Carter is approaching his own mortality will be recognized as among his many enduring gifts.  As a culture we continue to struggle with how to prepare ourselves for death.  Advances in medicine continue to lengthen our lifespans, but also to prolong our dying, often unnecessarily.   We need role models for how to think about dying, how to prepare for death, how – as Carter put it – to “look forward to a new adventure.”  

The notion that the death of a President could teach us something important about life is largely alien to the contemporary American mind.  That a former President might die a noble death, and that we might come to be the better for it, will strike some as either morbid, or pathetic, or a combination of the two.  Some readers of this essay may take offense that I have chosen to write it even while President Carter is still alive.
To be clear, I am hoping that President Carter lives for many more years.  But I am hoping even more fervently that he will continue to allow us to accompany him on this next leg of his journey.   An American saint is doing the disciplined, soul-stirring work our forebears called “preparing to meet your maker."  We would do well to sit up and pay close attention – somewhere in Jimmy Carter’s dying there is a lesson for us all.

READ MORE:
MRS. HUNTER'S HAPPY DEATH:
Lessons on Living from People Preparing to Die

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