Former first lady Barbara Bush in failing health
Spokesman: 92-year-old not seeking treatment, surrounded by family.
Former first lady Barbara Bush is in “failing health” and won’t seek additional medical treatment, a Bush family spokesman said Sunday.
“Following a recent series of hospitalizations, and after consulting her family and doctors, Mrs. Bush, now age 92, has decided not to seek additional medical treatment and will instead focus on comfort care,” spokesman Jim McGrath said in a news release.
McGrath did not elaborate on the nature of Bush’s health problems. She has been treated for decades for Graves’ disease, a thyroid condition. She had open- heart surgery in 2009 to replace a hardened aortic valve, and she was in the hospital last year for bronchitis.
“It will not surprise those who know her that Barbara Bush has been a rock in the face of her failing health, worrying not for herself — thanks to her abiding faith — but for others,” McGrath said. “She is surrounded by a family
she adores, and appreciates the many kind messages and especially the prayers she is receiving.”
She is one of only two first ladies who was also the mother of a president. The other was Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams and mother of John Quincy Adams.
She married George H.W. Bush in 1945. They had six children and have been married longer than any other presidential couple in American history.
Eight years after she and her husband left the White House, she stood with her husband as their son George W. was sworn in as the nation’s 43rd president.
“Barbara Bush has a character that is as big, inspiring and iconic as Texas,” Gov. Greg Abbott said in a statement Sunday. “Cecilia and I ask all Texans to join us in praying for Barbara and the entire Bush family during this time.”
Barbara Pierce Bush was born in New York on June 8, 1925. Her father was the publisher of McCall’s and Redbook magazines. She married at age 19 while George H.W. Bush was a young naval aviator. After World War II, the Bushes moved to Texas, where he went into the oil business.
In addition to being first lady, Barbara Bush has spent decades championing literacy issues. The Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy began during her White House years, with a goal to improve the lives of disadvantaged Americans by boosting literacy among parents and their children. The foundation partners with local programs and had awarded more than $40 million as of 2014 to create or expand more than 1,500 literacy programs nationwide.
“Focusing on the family is the best place to start to make this country more literate, and I still feel that being more literate will help us solve so many of the other problems facing our society,” she wrote in her 1994 memoir.
George H.W. Bush, 93, also has had health issues in recent years.
In April 2017, he was released from a hospital in Houston after two weeks of treatment for a mild case of pneumonia and chronic bronchitis. Months earlier, he had been at Houston’s Methodist Hospital for 16 days, also for pneumonia.
The nation’s 41st president was hospitalized in 2015 in Maine, where he and his wife spend summers at their home in Kennebunkport, after falling at home and breaking a bone in his neck. He was hospitalized in Houston in December 2014 for about a week for shortness of breath and spent Christmas 2012 in intensive care for a bronchitis-related cough and other issues.
George H.W. Bush, who has a form of Parkinson’s disease and uses a motorized scooter or a wheelchair for mobility, served as president from 1989 to 1993. He also was a congressman, the CIA director and Ronald Reagan’s vice president.