First, I would like to offer my condolences and sympathy to the Obama family for their loss today. Madelyn Dunham deserved more than anyone to see her grandson make history tomorrow, though I know that she already was - and would have been, no matter what - exceedingly proud of Barack and his accomplishments. His devotion to his family and his understanding of the importance of being there for his grandmother speaks deeply to me.
It also parallels my own experiences this year. This year, I lost two family members - my paternal grandfather in May, and my mother at the beginning of October. Both of them lived in Michigan, the state in which I grew up, and which I departed for Seattle in 2005 after graduating college.
Part of this news story particularly resonated with me:
"We're all praying and we hope she does, but one of the things I want to make sure of is I had a chance to sit down with her and to talk to her. She's still alert and she's still got all her faculties. And I want to make sure that I don't miss that opportunity," he said.
Obama has said he missed a chance to visit his mother just before she died of ovarian cancer — she was 53 when she died in 1995 — and didn't want to repeat that mistake. Dunham, whose birthday is Sunday, was staying at her Honolulu apartment.
When my grandfather was dying, I had gotten a chance to talk to him by phone shortly after he became very ill. But by the time I managed to get on a plane and make it out to Michigan, he was comatose, occasionally responding to stimuli but never lucid. The day before he died, I had a chance to sit with him for a few minutes and just tell him what I'd been up to, in the hopes that he'd heard me on some level.
He held out just long enough for the last of his grandchildren to arrive - he died about five minutes after my cousin got to his hospital room. Consciously or not, it seemed he was only ready to go once his family had gotten to see him again.
Earlier this year, my mother was diagnosed with a resurgence of the cancer she survived eight years ago. It was a very quick cancer, this time, due to the degree to which it had silently metastasized in the intervening years - she was diagnosed in June, and by August she was permanently hospitalized. I managed to fly in twice more from Seattle.
The second time was the more urgent - Mom had decided it was time for her to go home. She loved her house, and had spent much of the last twenty years renovating and redecorating it. Since she had a lot of trouble breathing without a ventilator, we knew this was pretty much it, and I flew out that night, arriving the next afternoon just in time for her trip home from the hospital.
That evening was the happiest we'd seen her in months. That night, she stopped breathing and died. She'd decided to stop fighting, and went peacefully and proud of her family.
But I will eternally be thankful that I got there in time. And I'm very glad that Obama made it to see his Toot in time, too.