Rosalynn Carter returns for the last time to the place where she found the most comfort

To them, she was more than a first lady.

Rosalynn Carter was the woman with strong opinions and few reservations about sharing them, the mother who had to intervene when her eldest son’s catastrophic attempt to bake a pie led to a kitchen fire, the grandmother who left a stash of blueberries in the freezer and the great-grandmother who raced toddlers with her walker.

“She was happiest when there was a new baby,” Josh Carter, one of her grandsons, recalled Wednesday from the pulpit of Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, the small town in Georgia farm country she never strayed too far from , even though she was pulled into the world.

The simple red-brick church where Mrs. Carter had worshiped for decades was filled Wednesday for her funeral with the people who had known her as mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, aunt, neighbor and friend. Her husband, Jimmy, who is 99 and has been in hospice care since February, was also there, sitting in a wheelchair just in front of the church.

Since her death on November 19 at the age of 96, Mrs Carter has been remembered as a force for change in transforming the role of first lady, challenging stigmas around mental health and tackling diseases such as the Guinea worm, which once was seen as persistent. A day earlier, she was celebrated at a sprawling shrine in Atlanta by presidents and all living first ladies.

But Wednesday’s service was less about the broader world and more about the family she adored and the community she formed.

“Her family, her neighbors, her friends all knew that she was someone who did not think about herself, but rather about others and the needs of others,” said the Rev. Tony Lowden, a former pastor of Maranatha Baptist Church who was close had with her. the Carters of recent years.

The agency examined what might seem a striking contrast. Mrs. Carter lived a seemingly limitless life as she rose to the highest levels of political influence and ventured to some 122 countries. Yet she also felt the constant pull of home, returning to the comfort she found in Plains, which is dozens of miles from a highway or even a stoplight. She was buried there Wednesday, on the grounds of the modest farmhouse she and Mr. Carter built in 1961, just off the town’s main drag.

Her children and grandchildren portrayed her as formidable, with a relentless drive that many considered a major factor in her husband’s ascension to the presidency and the success of their work at the Carter Center after leaving the White House. She was also described as defying gender norms as her marriage developed into an “equal relationship,” as John William Carter, her eldest son, put it.

“It seems to me that father got used to mother not agreeing with him, because she was very good at it,” her son said during the service. “She became a partner in the truest sense of the word.”

He believed that the sense of purpose and determined diplomacy of a parent raising a large family — with three sons and a daughter — was evident Tuesday at the memorial service in Atlanta, where, at Mrs. Carter’s invitation, Democrats and Republicans were by their side. side.

“My mother had a funeral with three presidents and six first ladies,” said John William Carter, better known as Jack, “and I believe the reason she was able to do that was because of what she learned from us boys and what she has learned. my father taught.”

Josh Carter said his grandmother was not motivated by power, especially when it came to her work in mental and public health and protecting democracy. “My mother was motivated by the people,” he said. “She saw people in forgotten corners of forgotten places as people who have hopes and dreams and are worthy of love.”

He pointed out that he called her mother because she was only 47 when her first grandson was born — far too young to be called a grandmother, she argued. And so he should always clarify: “Do you mean ‘mama’ mother’ – his own mother – or ‘Rosalynn’ mother?’”

Josh Carter also recalled seeing her in a boardroom at the Carter Center — where she and her husband hosted world leaders and held important meetings — chasing toddlers and playing peek-a-boo.

And he remembered family vacations with his grandparents to Disney World. She loved Tower of Terror, a ride that simulates a free-falling elevator. “Many members of the Secret Service did not share this view,” he said.

In his eulogy, Pastor Lowden encouraged people to look at Mrs. Carter’s life as a lesson, noting how widely loved she was, even by people who did not know her. It was virtually impossible, he said, to find “anyone who has anything bad to say about Rosalynn Carter — not one word, not a news article, never even one person on the left or the right.”

But she did not achieve that, he said, by staying out of the fray and remaining silent. It was the exact opposite. ‘Will the women of our country have a little bit of Rosalynn in them?’ he said. “Are they willing to fight for those who are hurting, broken and crushed in spirit?”

He could see her influence within their church community, as she and her husband remained active in the church well into their 90s. Maranatha Baptist Church was founded by people who left Plains Baptist Church in the 1970s after that congregation voted against allowing black members to join.

“She loved you,” Pastor Lowden told the Maranatha congregation. “She loved this church, she loved the reason it was founded and she loved what it stood for.”

She also loved her husband, he said.

“I won the prize,” Rev. Lowden said, imagining the message Mrs. Carter would like to convey to her husband from the afterlife. “Tell him I defeated him and I’m waiting for him.”