After her diagnosis, Ms. Soetoro spent the last months of her life in Hawaii, near her mother. (Her father had died.) Mr. Obama has recalled talking with her in her hospital bed.
She died in November 1995, as Mr. Obama was starting his first campaign for public office.
"She was not a standard-issue girl of her times. ... She wasn't part of the matched-sweater-set crowd," said Wall, a classmate and retired philosophy teacher who used to make after-school runs to Seattle with Dunham to sit and talk -- for hours and hours -- in coffee shops.
"She touted herself as an atheist, and it was something she'd read about and could argue," said Maxine Box, who was Dunham's best friend in high school. "She was always challenging and arguing and comparing. She was already thinking about things that the rest of us hadn't."
Barack Obama's mother as a self-assured, iconoclastic young teen seemingly hell-bent to resist Eisenhower-era conformity.
Karl Rove just clarified it for me - and sorry if I’m the only one who missed it - her argument with the insurance company was whether her cancer was a preexisting condition. I assume it is possible she may have acquired her cancer while in Indonesia.
He must have talked with her over the phone then, because I recall him saying his biggest regret was that he wasn't there with his mother when she passed away.
Exactly as I pictured her before being told. It took a parent like that to raise an Obama. A misfit.