Rosalynn Carter died Sunday. It was a lousy way to start the week, even if she lived a long life of 96 years and did the “died peacefully with her family at her side” thing that we all hope for when we check out.
Rosalynn was a pioneer of sorts. Long before people (mostly right-wingers) were freaking out about Hillary Clinton having too much sway in Bill Clinton’s White House, President Jimmy Carter described Rosalynn as an extension of himself and his closest advisor.
My mother loved her.
Even among presidents she despised, my mother held a soft spot for the first lady. She liked Betty Ford and Pat Nixon, and while at first she did not like Nancy Reagan, nothing endeared you to my mother more than personal tragedy, so when it came out Reagan had Alzheimer’s, Nancy became a figure worthy of empathy.
This was a big change from when she was First Lady. In fact, to give you an idea of what she thought of her, she said her smile was fake and made her look like the “Have a Nice Day” smiley face on the garbage can I had in my bedroom. Yes, I had a “Have a Nice Day” smiley face garbage can. I was a smartass teen, I thought it was funny.
But Mom loved Rosalynn Carter from the get-go. She thought of her as graceful, kind, smart, and classy. Mom also appreciated Carter’s dedication to reforming how America viewed and treated mental illness. My mother struggled with serious depression, every now and then it would render her to lying on the couch in a deep funk. It used to terrify me the few times I witnessed it happening as a kid. I believe that the First Lady advocating for mental health meant a lot to my mother.
Mom also loved Carter’s advocacy for the Equal Rights Amendment and her empathy for the disadvantaged. But perhaps the one quality that endeared Carter to my mother was her faith.
My mother was a religious FDR/JFK/MLK Democrat, and in her mind, Jesus would be for civil rights and policies that helped low-income people. There’s some biblical evidence he would have been. To my mother, the Carters were caring people because of their faith. You can likely find some evidence that the overbearing weight of the presidency, including the pressure from big money interests, sometimes forced the Carters off that track, that they didn’t always do the best thing to help less fortunate Americans.
But can one find another presidential couple who did more with their post-White House lives than the Carters? It certainly did not go unnoticed by my mother. Despite our household being a working-class one where our finances were often a concern, and how she struggled after my father died to live on a fixed income, my mother always wanted to help low-income people. I grew up next to a low-income housing project, my mother became friends with some of our neighbors from there, and if you tried any “welfare Cadillac mom buys lobster with food stamps” bullshit on her, you would get quickly corrected.
My mother seemed almost obsessed with the Carters’ work in Habitat for Humanity. She would often say “I’d help but I don’t know how to hammer anything” so she’d give what she could to the organization, and proudly display the Christmas card she’d get from them. Like any true Rosalynn fan would.
My mother died in late 2016, but it was a second death as we lost her to dementia several years prior. Now with Rosalynn gone, I imagine the Carter’s children feel the same way I did…the world has lost a good woman.
The last word goes to Willie Nelson, with what I understand was Rosalynn’s favorite song.