Subhi Agrawal
Josh Carter, the grandson of former President Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter, is shining a light on the often-overlooked challenges of caregiving in a new documentary short produced by Bradley Cooper.
On Monday, October 7, a new documentary short that explores the former first lady’s mission to better help caregivers and how her passion to the matter trickled down to newer generations of Carters will premiere. It is the first in an ongoing series on the impact of caregiving.
A Personal Journey Through Caregiving
Josh Carter is a recurring family caregiver and the grandson of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter through their son Jeff. He discusses his first experience caring for a loved one in Caregiving: Generations, a portion of a bigger Caregiving documentary that will air on PBS next year, before he had had time to fully absorb Rosalynn’s persistent efforts to raise awareness of the problem.
“My mom’s mother [Dorothy Davis] was a big part of our life. She was as involved as you would hope a grandma would be. But when I was about to start ninth grade, she had her stroke,” Josh says in the video. “Caregiving became a full-time responsibility for the whole family. The toll it took on our family was real.”
Challenges as a caregiver
He continues: “Taking care of a loved one, it’s something that we do out of love, it’s something we could do that is– that we do out of need and necessity. But it is hard, and it’s lonely, and the resources just aren’t there.”
Josh was prepared to take on the role of caregiver when his youngest son, Jonathan, was diagnosed with a rare and persistent intestinal condition when he was still a baby. Josh had firsthand experience with Davis, which taught him the value of family caring.
“Right now, I have Jonathan, who is in kindergarten, and Charlie, who is in sixth grade. Josh says in the movie, “We were changing Jonathan’s diaper when he was three months old, and instead of what you’d normally expect for a diaper, we saw blood.” “Charlie was 6 and we tried very hard to make sure Charlie knew that he was a loved member of the family, but every single day was consumed around Jonathan and consumed around Jonathan’s care.”
“Charlie’s going through what I went through, and what my grandmother went through: Learning that caregiving is a necessary part of a loving family,” he says. As Josh says in the movie, Rosalynn’s activity in the caregiving sector didn’t really make an impression on him “until I was able to step away from the crisis at my own house.”
Honoring Rosalynn Carter’s Legacy
He discovered that Rosalynn met a lot of families who were finding it difficult to meet the responsibilities of caregiving and experiencing feelings of isolation as a result during the height of Jimmy’s political career in Georgia.
“Rosa knew exactly what that household looked like, and she knew that there were things that the government could do to help people that are in such dire needs. When my grandfather won the race, then she sought out to change things for the better for family caregivers,” he says. “One of the main focuses of my grandmother’s life was to find people that were invisible and make them visible.”
There are only four types of people in the world: those who have been caregivers, those who are caregivers now, those who will be caregivers, and those who will require caregiving, according to Rosalynn Carter, who famously testified before the Senate decades later. Carter founded the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregivers in 1987. We are all that.
Caregiving: Generations was selected to debut with a teaser trailer for WETA’s bigger Caregiving project, which features Bradley Cooper discussing his personal connection to the topic, during the United Nations’ International Day of Older Persons event on October 7.
“I didn’t even think about caregiving until my father was diagnosed with cancer,” Cooper says in the film, shown below. “I used to dress up like my dad in kindergarten and be teased for wanting to wear a suit and tie. My dad was someone I looked up to. And it’s really traumatizing to give him a bath after that.”
The caregiving documentary
Fittingly, the U.N.’s showing of the clips coincides with this year’s UNIDOP subject, “Aging with Dignity: The Importance of Strengthening Care and Support Systems for Older Persons Worldwide,” and kicks off the country’s engagement campaign around the Caregiving documentary.
Well Beings is a multi-year public health project launched by PBS’s flagship D.C. station, WETA, to raise awareness of important health concerns facing the country. The upcoming feature film in the Well Beings series, the Caregiving documentary, will have its full premiere as a two-hour primetime special in the spring of 2025.
Executive produced by Lea Pictures and WETA in collaboration with Ark Media, Caregiving is a program that WETA presents.
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