Final Years and Death
Shortly after her eldest son left office in January 1981, Carter was diagnosed with breast cancer. While her cancer was in remission in April 1983, her younger daughter, Ruth Stapleton was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died on September 26, 1983, at 54. Carter herself succumbed to breast, bone and pancreatic cancers a month later on October 30, 1983, at age 85 in Americus, Georgia. Her three surviving children were by her side at her death. Carter was buried in a simple six-minute ceremony at Lebanon Church Cemetery, on November 1, 1983, next to her husband, who died 30 years before her.
Three of her children, Billy Carter, Ruth Carter Stapleton and Gloria Spann, also died from pancreatic cancer; only the former president has not inherited the disease. He has become a fund-raiser and booster for research into a cure for the disease.
In 2001, a major nursing centre was dedicated in her honor in Plains by Jimmy Carter in recognition of first years of service to the community as a nurse.
Read more about this topic: Lillian Gordy Carter
Famous quotes containing the words final, years and/or death:
“The final aim is not to know, but to be.... You’ve got to know yourself so that you can at last be yourself. “Be yourself” is the last motto.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“I see the callus on his sole,
The disappearing last of him
And of his race starvation slim,
Oh, years ago—ten thousand years.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“It is better to sit down than to stand, it is better to lie down than to sit, but death is the best of all.”
—Indian proverb, quoted in Sébastien-roch Nicolas de Chamfort, Maxims and Considerations, vol. 1, no. 155 (1796, trans. 1926)