President Biden says he plans to deliver the eulogy for former President Jimmy Carter, who remains under hospice care at his Georgia home.

Biden told donors Monday night at a fundraiser in California about a recent visit to the 39th president, whom Biden has known since he was a young senator from Delaware who supported Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign.

He asked me to do his eulogy, Biden said, before stopping to say more. Excuse me; I shouldn’t say that.

Carter, who is the longest-living U.S. president at age 98, announced on Feb. 18 that he would spend his remaining days at home receiving end-of-life care and refraining from further medical intervention after a series of brief hospitalizations.

The Carter Center in Atlanta and the former president’s relatives have not disclosed details of his condition, though Biden alluded to Carter’s 2015 cancer diagnosis and subsequent recovery.

Jimmy Carter, the oldest living former US president ever, is placed in hospice

I spent time with Jimmy Carter, and it eventually caught up with him. But they found a way to keep him going much longer than they expected because they found a breakthrough, Biden said at Rancho Sante Fe in San Diego County.

The president and first lady Jill Biden visited Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, who is now 95, at their home in Plains, Georgia, a few months after Biden took office in 2021.

Biden was the first U.S. senator to endorse Carter’s 1976 presidential bid, breaking with the Washington establishment that shocked Carter, then a former former governor of Georgia, by winning the Democratic nomination.

Biden’s presidency marks a sort of sea change for Carter’s political stature. He served just one term in the White House after losing to Republican Ronald Reagan in a landslide in 1980, prompting top Democrats to keep their distance from the former president for decades, at least in public.

Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were not close to Carter. And the long-awaited presidential candidates who sometimes ventured to Plains over the years usually did so privately.

In his final days, Jimmy Carter is on the cusp of a humanitarian goal: to eradicate a parasitic worm

But as the Carters’ global humanitarian work and democracy advocacy through the Carter Center garnered respect, Democratic politicians began publicly visiting South Georgia ahead of the 2020 election cycle. And with Biden’s election, Carter once again found a real friend and ally in the Oval Office.

Some Carter family members have confirmed that the former president will have a state funeral in Washington, D.C., and a private funeral and burial in Plains. Former and incumbent presidents often speak at the state funerals of their predecessors, sometimes even through the political community.

Clinton spoke at Republican Richard Nixon’s funeral in 1994. In 2007, Carter praised Gerald Ford that the Republican he defeated to win the presidency. The first time, rivals had become good friends after their presidency and agreed that whoever would survive the longest would pay tribute at the other’s funeral.

When George H. W. Bush died in 2018, fellow Republican Donald Trump was present as the sitting president, but the only former president to speak at the Washington National Cathedral service was the late president’s son, George W. Bush.