My grandfather Jimmy Carter turned 100 years old on October 1, 2024.
I honestly never thought we would get here.
Over the past decade, Papa survived cancer that spread to his brain, a broken hip, several bad falls, a brain bleed, the pandemic, and more hospital stays than any of us wanted to count. He entered hospice care in February 2023. Then he turned 99. Then we lost my grandmother Rosalynn after 77 years of marriage. I had a hard time imagining one of them without the other.
But Papa kept going.
Of course, surviving impossible situations is not exactly new for Jimmy Carter.
In this episode, I tell some of my favorite stories from a lifetime in which my grandfather has proven remarkably difficult to kill. As a young submariner, he was washed overboard in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and somehow thrown back onto his own submarine. He nearly had a massive ship drop an anchor on his head. He survived a catastrophic diving failure aboard the USS Pomfret. A few years later, Admiral Hyman Rickover sent him to help dismantle the damaged nuclear reactor at Chalk River, where he received a radiation dose that would be completely unacceptable today.
And that was just the Navy.
He later canoed the Bull Sluice rapids of the Chattooga River, walked into Three Mile Island after the nuclear accident, confronted Manuel Noriega over a fraudulent election, traveled repeatedly to North Korea, and flew into war-torn Liberia after convincing Charles Taylor to stop shooting long enough for his plane to land.
Apparently retirement was never really his thing.
I also talk about the stranger side of having someone you love become international news. My family has occasionally learned supposedly terrible news about itself from reporters, Twitter, text messages, and—in one particularly confusing episode—the death of Mr. Peanut. I tell the story of being in Scotland when a fake press release announcing my grandfather’s death went viral, and what it is like when millions of people are suddenly discussing a very personal moment in your family before you even know whether anything has happened.
But this episode ends where it should: in Plains.
Our family gathered at Papa’s house on October 1 to celebrate the first American president to reach 100 years old. The Navy flew four F/A-18s over the house. We ate lunch on the back porch. We brought out a cake with a big “100” on it, sang Happy Birthday, and watched three of his six-year-old great-grandchildren blow out the candles.
After everything it took to get there, it was an extraordinary day.
Happy 100th birthday, Papa.