Obama’s Inspiration, His Grandmother, Dies at 86

“She poured everything she had into me.”
— Barack Obama

Madelyn Payne Dunham, Senator Barack Obama’s maternal grandmother, died in Honolulu early this morning. She was 86 and had been suffering from cancer. Dunham helped raise the Democratic presidential nominee and frequently was cited in his speeches as an inspiration. Two weeks ago Obama took a day off from his campaign to visit the ailing woman he called Toot — a form of Tutu, which means “grandparent” in Hawaiian.

Dunham died between 3 and 4 a.m. Hawaii time, with Obama’s half sister Maya Soetoro-Ng at her side. Media outlets reported that Obama learned of the death shortly after 8 a.m. today in Jacksonville, Fla.

A statement released this afternoon by Obama and Soetoro-Ng said, “She was the cornerstone of our family and a woman of extraordinary accomplishment, strength and humility. She was the person who encouraged and allowed us to take chances. She was proud of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren and left this world with the knowledge that her impact on all of us was meaningful and enduring. Our debt to her is beyond measure.”

“It’s very, very sad, because we all hoped that she would be able to sustain her strength through Election Day itself,” said Hawaii Democratic Representative Neil Abercrombie, a family friend. “She passed away confident that he would succeed … His strength, his calm demeanor that characterized him in these last weeks and last days — this quiet strength that come across so clearly — that comes from his grandmother; there’s no question about that. It’s her great legacy.”

Obama may be the man of the hour, or of the year, but his biography is defined by the women in his family. Ann Dunham was the “mother from Kansas” who married the man from Kenya. Michelle Williams Obama, the candidate’s wife, has become an important, increasingly warming voice on the campaign stump. His daughters Malia and Sasha stole the show the opening night of the Democratic National Convention.

(See pictures of Barack Obama’s family tree.)

(See pictures of Barack Obama’s campaign behind the scenes.)

But as Obama acknowledged in his acceptance speech at the convention, his grandmother was the rock on which his character and future were built. “She’s the one who taught me about hard work,” he said. “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. 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.”

A loving grandson could also be a judging one, as Obama showed in his Philadelphia speech on race early this year. He attempted to explain his relationship with his former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, by talking about another complicated relationship: “I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman 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 her by on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

Madelyn Lee Payne was born into a strict Methodist family in Peru, Kans., in 1922. She fell in love with Stanley Dunham, a furniture salesman, and, against her parents’ wishes, married him in 1940. When he enlisted in the Army during World War II, she got a job on a Wichita assembly line making Boeing B-29s. Their daughter was born in 1942, and because Stanley had wanted a boy, they named the girl Stanley Ann. Over the next two decades, Dunham moved at least five times — always in pursuit of her husband’s next adventure as a salesman. In 1960 the Dunhams moved to Honolulu, and a year later, Barack Hussein Obama Jr. was born.

Obama’s birth does not appear to have been planned. His mother and father met at the University of Hawaii and got married when she was already pregnant. To help provide for the new baby, Obama’s grandmother, who did not have a college degree, got a job as a secretary at a bank. For more than two decades, she got up at 5 a.m., put on a suit and took the bus to work, arriving first at the office. Eventually — and much more slowly than her male counterparts — she advanced and was promoted to vice president. She earned more money than her husband, and her job became a “source of delicacy and bitterness” for the couple, Obama wrote in his memoir, Dreams from My Father.

(See pictures of Barack Obama’s family tree.)

(See pictures of Barack Obama’s campaign behind the scenes.)

Obama never really knew his biological father, who died in a car crash in Kenya in 1982, and his grandfather died in 1992, three years before his mother. But Obama’s grandmother was always there. She took care of Obama when he was 10 and returned to Hawaii to attend school while his mother spent a few years continuing her anthropological research in Indonesia. At the time, his grandparents helped Obama get a scholarship to Punahou, an élite prep school on the island. All three of them lived in a small, two-bedroom apartment on Beretania Street in Honolulu.

Dunham, Obama wrote in Dreams, was motivated by “the needs of her grandchildren and the stoicism of her ancestors.” “So long as you kids do well, Bar,” she would tell him, “that’s all that really matters.”

Obama has said that his biggest mistake was not being at his mother’s side when she died of cancer in Hawaii in 1995 at the age of 52. Dreams from My Father had come out only four months before, and he was starting his first campaign, for the Illinois state senate. Her death came quickly, and he didn’t make it back in time.

This time, he did not make the same mistake. Since February 2007, as Obama pursued his presidential dream, Dunham watched her grandson on TV from her apartment. This fall, she cast her ballot for him, in early, absentee voting. And two weeks ago, for two precious days, he got to thank her in person for helping make him what he is and could be.

— With reporting by Dan Nakaso / Honolulu

(See pictures of Barack Obama’s family tree.)

(See pictures of Barack Obama’s campaign behind the scenes.)