On November 19, 1992, a frail little bird of a woman lay dying in Greenwich, Connecticut, and her son came to bid her goodbye. “She lay on a pillow, tiny, fighting hard for every breath,” he son wrote in his diary that night. “Her little frayed Bible, her old one was there, and I looked in it and there were some notes that I had written her from Andover … ”
That woman was Dorothy Walker Bush, and her son was the 41st president of the United States, who had just lost his job to Bill Clinton, and spent the morning sobbing at her bedside. I’ve been thinking of that moment since word went out that Barack Obama would take time from the end-game of his campaign to visit his gravely ill grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, in Hawaii.
Mrs. Dunham, who turns 86 on Sunday, is what amounts to Obama’s last living parent, his last link to the breathtakingly improbable lineage that has propelled him to the brink of the presidency. She and her late husband, Stanley, effectively raised him for much of his youth, and he has said she poured everything she had into him. He calls her “Toot,” short for “tu-tu,” the Hawaiian for grandparent.
Without a college degree, Mrs. Dunham rose to become the first female vice president of the Bank of Hawaii. She didn’t much care for luau cuisine, preferring to go home for a plate of scrambled eggs and some cigarettes. Somehow, in 1960, she and her husband simply accepted that their 17-year-old daughter became pregnant by an African exchange student, and her son became theirs, too. How full her heart must be right now.
Obama has spoken with feeling at his regret that he did not make it to Hawaii in time to see his own mother, when she was dying of ovarian cancer at 52. He’s clearly determined not to make the same mistake this time. But what must Madelyn Dunham be feeling, knowing that even if she lives to see her grandson elected, she will—in all probability—never see him again?
She may feel a bit like another old woman, living in a remote spot in Illinois, whose son took an arduous trip by passenger train, freight train, and buggy to see her on January 30, 1860, before he left Springfield to assume the presidency. She was Sarah Bush Lincoln and she, too, had poured everything she had—including a love of books and learning—into her stepson Abraham. When he left, she was in tears, and she recalled years later, when the story was over and done: “I did not want Abe to run for Presdt., did not want him elected—was afraid, somehow or other … that Something would happen him … and that I should see him no more.”
“No, No, Mama,” Lincoln told her. “Trust in the Lord and all will be well. We will See each other again.”
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