With humor, grace, grandson Jason Carter shares remarks at Rosalynn's tribute service
Thank you all for being here. As you can see from the service, music was so important to my grandmother and it’s been just beautiful. So, thank you, Governor and first Lady Kemp, thank you senators were knocking Ossoff. Thank you Congress people, Mayor Dickens. Thank you all and again, a special, thank you, Secretary Clinton, Mrs Bush, Mrs Obama, Mrs Trump and Dr Biden. Thank you all for coming and acknowledging this remarkable sisterhood that you share with my grandmother. And thank you all for your leadership that you provided for our country and the world Secretary Clinton and
Dr Biden, we also welcome your lovely husbands. Ok? I mean, uh this is a difficult day for my family. Um, but we have been so enormously gratified by the love and support that we have felt from across the world. So thank you so much. And as Reverend Warnock told me, uh my grandmother doesn’t need a eulogy. Her life was a sermon and it was a mighty testament to the power of faith and the power of a deep and determined love. And she lived this public love story that we all know of that has inspired the
world, including in these last days. And I think of all the things she accomplished, her most viral moment was when they were at a baseball game
example, we all got cards from her on our birthdays, $20 bill in it when I was 45 $20 bills like, and she was so down to earth y’all, it was amazing. And one of the stories we’ve been talking about in my family these last few days is we were on a family trip and we were on a flight on Delta from here to somewhere and we were all sitting in the back of the airplane together and it took off and we looked over, my grandmother took out this Tupperware of Pimento cheese and this loaf of
bread. And she just started making sandwiches and, and she gave it to all of us grandkids and everything and then she just started giving them to other people on the plane and people were sitting there like Roslyn Carter just made me this sandwich, you know, and they, they couldn’t believe it, but she loved people and she was a cool grandma. She was cool like she did tai chi with the sword. And if you want to see a five year old boy be excited, they would come back. Dad. You know, Mom Carter has a sword. You
know, she once told me about this trip, papa that y’all took to Havana in the fifties. She said y’all went down there for the night and you didn’t get a hotel room. And I said, what you do? She looked at me like we danced and we slept on the plane. They d didn’t they, she was a rock for our family. And that’s true. But in many ways, she was more as chips. Had an adventurer, a Voyager, a mountain climber. She learned to ski in her sixties and then skied for 25 more years. As Chip said,
she fished trout streams from Georgia to Wyoming and from Venezuela to Siberia, visited 100 and 20 countries, climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Fuji and summited peaks in Bolivia and other places. And I know that she went to the Everest base camp in Nepal and I can guarantee you that she was looking up at that thing and thinking if they would just let me and based on what she did, I think she could have done it. She was born just a few years after women got the right to vote in this small town in the south
where people were still plowing their fields behind mules. But she was made for these long journeys and she was made to summit these mountains. As they said before, when she started in politics, she’d never talk to a group of people bigger than her Sunday school class. And then she elected a governor and a president. She shaped our national policies. She faced down dictators herself on issues of human rights. She built the Carter Center from an idea into a powerhouse human rights. And as the chair of the board, I’ve watched her do it and it’s because
she poured out her love all over the world. And especially as Cathy said, the end of the road, her 122 countries included Liberia and Mali and Sudan. And it was natural for her to open up her heart to those people, not with pity, but as partners. And she knew in those communities and recognized that ancient steel from rural women who carried their Children and their communities on their backs, whether they’re from a 600 person town in South Georgia or South Sudan. As the song says, she knew what comes back when you give your love away.
And for my grandmother, what came back was this unshakable strength and this powerful faith and not just an abiding love, but a fierce, determined adventurous love that sustained her on all of these long journeys, journeys. Like k you mentioned a guinea worm eradication which has taken almost 40 years. But the Carter Center’s unwavering efforts and their powerful partners in these tiny villages took a disease that affected 3.5 million people every year in the poorest parts of the world. And this year there won’t be millions of cases. Papa. This year we’ve had seven total cases and
we’re in the last mile because she could see far and she kept going was not afraid of these long journeys. Her advocacy for mental health was a 50 year climb. That is as remarkable as any other and has been mentioned already. But if you imagine just how far our society has come in the last five years on issues of mental health. And you think that she decided in 1970 to tackle the ancient stigma associated with mental illness. It is remarkable how far she could see and how far she was willing to walk and that effort
changed lives and it saved lives including in my own family. She was made for these long journeys. Rosalynn Carter Institute helps caregivers because you can’t journey alone. Even the Roslyn Carter butterfly trail goes 3000 gardens from Mexico to Canada, help monarch butterflies on their journeys. John Lewis once said that in all of his marches, he only really learned one thing. Don’t let them turn you around. That was my grandmother to a t one of my last memories of her was in a hospital. We were there for my grandfather, but she had her own physical limitations
that made it hard for her to walk. She had to practice. She was ready to go for one of these walks and she picked up this cane and I looked at the cane. She looked at me and she said, you know, it’s not a cane. And I said, she said it’s a trekking pole. She said it’s the exact same kind that those women use when they go to the South Pole. I watched her walk down that hall, that trekking pole and I followed her and I just pray that we never lose sight of that path.
Amen. And thank you.
