Washington: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's grandmother died of cancer, he said in a statement on Monday, a little more than a week after Obama interrupted the White House race to say goodbye to her in Hawaii.
"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 with his sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng.
"She was the cornerstone of our family, and a woman of extraordinary accomplishment, strength, and humility,” he added.
Dunham helped raise Obama from the age of 10 while his mother was working in Indonesia, and Obama took an emotional 22-hour trip to Hawaii to visit her on October 23 and 24.
Known within the family as "Toot", a shortened form of the Hawaiian word "tutu" meaning grandmother, she gave him a stable home and the traditional American values brought from her own Midwestern childhood.
She was also a trailblazer in her own right, having risen from a lowly position to be one of the first women vice-presidents of the Bank of Hawaii.
In a major speech on race he gave in March, Obama described her as "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".
(With inputs from Reuters)
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