The 39th US president and humanitarian was 100

Jimmy Carter, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning 39th President of the United States who transformed his legacy from one-time commander-in-chief to beloved philanthropist, died on Sunday, December 29, at the record-breaking age of 100.

His son, James E. Carter III, confirmed that he died at home in Plains, Georgia The Washington Post. The Carter Center also announced his death in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

Carter’s wife of nearly eight decades, Rosalynn Carter, died at 13 months old earlier at the age of 96. He made his last public appearance in November 2023 to mourn her death.

Carter and Rosalynn are survived by four children: Jack, Chip, Jeff and Amy. In March 2019, Carter became the longest-living American president, also enjoying the longest post-White House life. He and Rosalynn’s 77-year marriage was the longest of any first couple.

The Carter Center announced in February 2023 that the former president had been moved to hospice care after “a series of brief hospitalizations,” adding that he had “decided to spend the remaining time at home with his family.”

Carter’s long life in hospice surprised the entire family, his grandson Jason Carter told PEOPLE in September 2023, adding that it turned out to be a “true blessing.”

“This is an important part of his faith journey that one cannot experience at any other time in his life except at the very end,” Jason said. “In that respect, I think this was a really meaningful time for him, and it was a really contemplative time for him.”

Jason told Life in the South in June that Carter was no longer awake every day, adding that his grandfather was “experiencing the world as best he can as he continues this process.”

Although President Carter has battled a number of health problems over the last decade, including a bout with cancer in 2015, he remained physically active into his 90s – continuing to help build homes for Habitat for Humanity and regularly attend church services and teach Sunday school.

In August 2015, Carter announced that he had had a small mass removed from his liver. That’s when doctors discovered he had cancer that had spread to other parts of his body.

He met the diagnosis with his trademark “humor and impatience,” his friend and former White House communications director Gerald Rafshoon told PEOPLE at the time. “This diagnosis hasn’t changed anything about Jimmy.”

The cancer disappeared within four months and he was able to resume his life as usual.

In July 2017, the former president made headlines again when he collapsed from dehydration at a Habitat for Humanity construction site in Canada – only to return the next morning after the hospital gave him the all-clear.

In October 2019, he was hospitalized after falling and fractured his pelvis at his home in Plains, Georgia. His injury was described as “minor” in a statement from the Carter Center.

The incident was his third fall of 2019 and second in October. Earlier this month he suffered 14 stitches to the head and a black eye after another accident. And in May 2019, he fell in his home and had to undergo surgery on his broken hip.

Hours after that incident the first of October, he traveled to Nashville with Mrs. Carter to oversee Habitat’s annual construction. There he helped glue, drill and nail pieces of wood together for corbels as part of a project to build 21 new homes in Nashville’s Park Preserve neighborhood.

“One of the things Jesus taught was: If you have any talents, try to use them for the benefit of others,” President Carter told PEOPLE from the Habitat site. “Rosa and I both tried that.”

“It’s hard to live until you’re 95,” he told PEOPLE in 2019. “I think the best explanation is to marry the best spouse: someone who cares about you and is committed and does things that challenge you” and keeps you alive and interested in life.

“I think both mine and Rosa’s minds are almost as good as they used to be, we have limited capabilities in terms of endurance and strength,” he added. “But we still try to stay busy and do good work.”

Brought into the White House in 1976 in the wake of Watergate and the deeply unpopular pardon of disgraced President Richard Nixon by his predecessor, President Gerald Ford, Carter, by all accounts, took a unique route to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

He was a son of the Deep South who became a nuclear scientist and Navy submariner, then a peanut farmer and community organizer, and then the desegregationist governor of his home state of Georgia, whose segregationist groups still had major electoral influence. After defeating then-President Ford in the 1976 presidential election, the Democrat became the Deep South’s first president since before the Civil War.

Carter’s time in the land’s highest office was marked by economic uncertainty, rising gas prices, political unrest, racial tensions and increasing signs of America’s waning power abroad.

Although he negotiated a permanent peace treaty between Egypt and Israel and restored formal diplomatic relations with China, his popularity plummeted when he committed a series of clumsy public relations gaffes and launched a rescue mission for American hostages in Iran that ended in fiasco and the A controversial boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow was implemented.

In a historic landslide, he lost re-election in 1980 to Republican rival Ronald Reagan.

After leaving the White House, however, the Carters set the standard for post-presidency activism that successors like the Clintons and Obamas have followed.

He and Rosalynn founded the Carter Center to promote world peace and human rights, brokered a nuclear non-proliferation treaty with North Korea, acted as unofficial diplomats on behalf of the United States in troubled areas around the world, and actively worked to build affordable homes for low-income families in the United States and abroad.

In 2002, Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to promote peace, democracy and human rights.

To those who knew him best as he rose to national fame, Carter remained the unassuming peanut farmer growing up in a tiny Georgia town.

Pennsylvania dairy farmer Wayne Harpster had been friends with Carter since their first fishing trip in 1979. They stayed in touch over the years, with Carter visiting Harpster almost every year for fishing. In 1989, the former president even helped his old fishing friend build a covered bridge.

“Nothing has changed between him and me in these years. That’s a lot of years,” Harpster told PEOPLE in 2014. “To me, he’s still President Carter.”

And President Carter was rarely without his first lady, Rosalynn, with whom he fell in love while attending the U.S. Naval Academy as a young man. Mrs. Carter shared her husband’s lack of presumption, his robust constitution, and his heart.

But more than that, Harpster said, she was Carter’s “fishing buddy…which goes deeper.” They were inseparable and traveled the world together, not only to monitor elections in emerging democracies, fight disease in forgotten poor villages and build homes for the homeless as part of Habitat for Humanity – but also to a faraway river sharing a tent where you could fish well.

Harpster said he was by the couple’s side as they celebrated their 67th wedding anniversary in Russia in July 2013.

“We had a little party at the fishing camp. It was kind of unique being with someone who had been together (for so long). You could see a lot of contentment between them,” he said. “I’ve never seen two people as close as they are.”

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The Carters remained full and equal partners in his post-presidency, even as Harpster said he felt the lingering pain of losing re-election among his friends.

“Mrs. C took it harder than the president,” he said. “But I think they both adapted pretty quickly and started starting so many projects with the Carter Center and doing all these good things in Africa… Just keeping busy and looking forward to what they could do for the world and “people who could do good.” who need help.”

“He had a very full, wonderful and productive life,” Carter’s cousin Betty Pope told PEOPLE. “He wanted to make sure that every day of his life he could do what he was personally called to do – which was to try to bring peace and make the world a better place.”