Democrat presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama’s grandmother Madelyn Dunham, whose death was announced on Monday on the eve of the US presidential election, was the rock on which he built his life and his stunning political career.
Dunham, who died aged 86 in Obama’s native Hawaii, had been in fragile health, suffering from osteoporosis and cancer. Her health had further deteriorated after she recently broke her hip.
Sensing her life was ebbing away, the Democratic nominee took the highly unusual step of leaving the White House trail to race to her bedside for a few hours on Oct. 24.
“It is with great sadness that we announce that our grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, has died peacefully after a battle with cancer,” Obama said in a joint statement on Monday with his sister Maya Soetoro-Ng. “She was the cornerstone of our family and a woman of extraordinary accomplishment, strength and humility.”
Along with his mother, Ann Dunham, a white American from Kansas who died of cancer more than a decade ago, Madelyn Dunham raised Obama and grounded him despite his rocky childhood after his Kenyan-born father deserted the family.
Obama paid moving tribute to Madelyn Dunham — who he called by the nickname “Toot,” a derivation of the Hawaiian word for grandmother — in his speech accepting the presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Denver in August.
“She’s the one who taught me about hard work. She’s the one who put off buying a new car or a new dress for herself so that I could have a better life,” Obama said.
“She poured everything she had into me. And although she can no longer travel, I know that she’s watching tonight and that tonight is her night as well.”
Unlike Obama’s wife Michelle and young daughters Malia and Sasha, Obama’s grandmother never entered the spotlight during the campaign because of her frail health.
The only contact voters had with her is through old photographs showing a youthful Obama with his grandmother and grandfather, who served in the US army in World War II. Madelyn Dunham worked on a bomber production line.
But she did emerge as an issue in the campaign, when Obama brought her up in a key speech on race while a controversy swirled over the fiery and racially tinged sermons of his former pastor Jeremiah Wright.
He said he could no more disown Wright than he could his “white grandmother.”
He said Dunham was someone who “loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”
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