Less than two weeks before the elections, the Senator made what is possibly his last visit to his grandmother
HONOLULU: Democrat Barack Obama made a detour from the presidential campaign trail to see his ailing grandmother in Hawaii on Friday, taking a somber trip to make perhaps his last visit to the woman who helped raise him.
After a 10-hour flight from Indiana to Hawaii, Obama hustled straight from the plane to 85-year-old Madelyn Dunham's bedside in the Honolulu apartment where he lived as a teenager. Obama decided to see her less than two weeks before the Nov 4 election, fearing that if he waited any longer it would be too late.
"I want to give her a kiss and a hug," Obama told ABC News before he left Indiana, in an interview aired on ‘Good Morning America’. "Without going through the details too much, she's gravely ill." The woman he calls ‘Toot’ — short for ‘tutu’, the Hawaiian word for grandmother — helped raise him from the age of 10 while Obama's mother was working in Indonesia. Dunham is often featured in his campaign-trail speeches.
"She's really been one of the cornerstones of my life," he told ABC, adding she had been inundated with flowers and e-mails and calls from total strangers since news of her illness became public. Dunham recently broke her hip and "she had some other problems that were getting worse. You know, we weren't sure, and I'm still not sure, whether she makes it to Election Day. We're all praying and we hope she does," Obama said.
Obama has said he did not want to repeat the mistake he made with his mother, who died of cancer a decade ago before he could reach her bedside. Obama saw his half-sister, who lives in Hawaii and has helped care for Dunham, at the apartment on Thursday night. A small crowd watched from across the street, including a woman with a handwritten sign reading "Best Wishes Obamas!"
The Illinois senator cut short a planned walk around his old neighbourhood on Friday after a small group of reporters and photographers rushed up. Obama had made it about two blocks from the building before the media caught up to him. An unhappy Obama hopped in his Secret Service vehicle and rode back to the apartment complex.
