HONOLULU — Barack Obama said a final goodbye Tuesday to the woman who served as his second mother.
The president-elect and a small group of family members attended a private memorial service for Madelyn Dunham, his grandmother and the woman who helped raise him here.
The roughly one-hour service was at the First Unitarian Church, a congregation that made national news in 1969 when it offered sanctuary to dissident servicemen protesting the Vietnam War.
The private service, held in a two-story home that is now the church, was followed by a private ceremony where Dunham’s ashes were scattered.
Aides said Obama was joined by his wife, Michelle, as well as his sister and brother-in-law, Maya Soe toro-Ng and Konrad Ng.
Obama’s motorcade stopped under late-afternoon sunshine at a highway pulloff overlooking the ocean.
Known to locals as the Lanai Lookout, it is the same overlook where Obama tossed a lei into the ocean in August in memory of his mother, who died in 1995.
Obama, his wife, their daughters and more than a dozen people climbed over a stone wall and down the rocky shoreline to get closer to the water for a ceremony to scatter his grandmother’s ashes.
Earlier this week, residents of the Punahou Circle Apartments reflected on the life of their longtime former neighbor.
The 12-story building on South Beretania Street served as Obama’s boyhood home. It now attracts the occasional tour bus, although those in the building say the number of tourists stopping has so far been minimal.
Dunham, known to her friends as “Toot,” lived in apartment No. 1008 for decades, paying well less than market rates because of a tradition in the building of not raising the rent for existing tenants.
She was fiercely independent and opinionated, according to those who lived with her in the building.
“She ruled to the very end,” said one longtime resident and friend. “She would want to prove to you that she could do it.”
In August, that meant Dunham refused any help from a neighbor in making a trip with her walker from her 10th-floor apartment to another one in the building for a social call.
“I realized she was still the boss,” the neighbor said.
While on vacation in Hawaii, the Obama family is staying in an oceanfront home over the mountain from downtown Honolulu where the president-elect grew up.
The five-bedroom wood-frame house sits on almost an acre of land fronting Kailua Beach, a favorite spot for windsurfers, kayakers and dog walkers.
