Tragic Details About The Life Of Barack Obama's Mother, Ann Dunham

Ann Dunham led an extraordinary life. As Barack Obama's mom, she played a pivotal role in raising the future president. "My mother was the biggest influence in my life," Obama explained in a 2022 Obama Foundation video. "She somehow understood that if you love a kid enough, even if you don't have a lot, if you filled their mind with a sense of wonder and joy, and you tell 'em that they can do anything, it turns out the kid usually does okay." 

Professionally, Dunham was an anthropologist, and she worked to create financial opportunities for women in Indonesia as well as globally. Her legacy lives on in at her alma mater, University of Hawaii, where there's an endowment fund named after her.

Part of Dunham's successes stemmed from her ability to deal with life's difficulties. For instance, when she and Obama lived in Indonesia, he got a long deep, cut after he was playing near a sharp fence. Worried about her son, Dunham had the added tension of dealing with difficulties in access to medical care. After she and Obama made the journey to the hospital, she had to search around to find someone to help them, only to discover the physicians on duty prioritized recreational activities before stitching Obama's wound. This wasn't the only time that Dunham had to deal with upsetting circumstances. She persevered in a multitude of situations, including unexpected parenthood, divorce, and illness.

Ann Dunham was a teen when she met Barack Obama Sr. at the University of Hawaii. Their romance began quickly, and Dunham got pregnant. She and Obama Sr. married in February 1961, and Obama was born six months later. "I never probed my mother about the details. Did they decide to get married because she was already pregnant? Or did he propose to her in the traditional, formal way?" he speculated to Time. Over the years, Obama struggled with the lack of concrete details about his parents' wedding. "The whole thing seems so fragile in retrospect, so haphazard," Obama wrote in his memoir "Dreams from My Father."

To further complicate matters, Obama Sr. had been married in Kenya, and the details are murky as to whether he had legally dissolved this marriage. According to Obama's memoir, his mother explained, "He had told me they were separated, but it was a village wedding, so there was no legal document that could show a divorce."

Sadly, Dunham and Obama Sr.'s marriage was short-lived. Even before they divorced in 1964, they were living separately. Dunham paused her education before Obama was born. When he was a baby, she became a student at the University of Washington, before transferring back to the University of Hawaii. By 1962, Obama Sr. moved to Harvard for graduate studies. The decision caused friction between the couple. If he had opted for The New School in New York, his financial aid package would have allowed Dunham and Obama to go with him.

In 1964 Ann Dunham married her second husband, Lolo Soetoro. The couple had met at the University of Hawaii, where Soetoro was an international student. Unfortunately, in 1965, the couple lived separately when political violence forced Soetoro to return to Indonesia. Dunham was still in college, and, after she graduated in 1967, she and Barack Obama moved to Indonesia. Three years later, Dunham and Soetoro's daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng, was born.

According to Obama's memoir, "Dreams From My Father," Dunham appreciated the way Soetoro bonded with Obama. However, Obama was aware of problems between his mom and stepfather, such as their difficulty communicating. Economic concerns and the political turmoil that had caused the couple's abrupt parting in the United States also took a toil. Even when Soetoro began earning more, it put new stresses on their relationship, since Dunham chafed at the idea of hobnobbing with the company's American employees and their spouses.

By 1972, Dunham and Soetoro separated when she went back to Hawaii, and they began divorce proceedings in 1980. Even so, Dunham's romantic outlook remained sanguine. "She was not someone who would take the detritus of those divorces and make judgments about men in general or love or allow herself to grow pessimistic," Soetoro-Ng explained to Time. In addition, long after their romance ended, Dunham and Soetoro maintained a compassionate connection, and Dunham even stepped in to advocate on Soetoro's behalf to get access to treatment in the United States when he was dealing with liver disease.

On two separate occasions during Barack Obama's childhood, he and Ann Dunham were living in different countries. When Obama was 10, Dunham told him he would be leaving Indonesia and moving back to Hawaii to pursue better educational opportunities. Unfortunately, Dunham needed to stay in Indonesia. "She was juggling a number of things," Janny Scott, author of a biography about Dunham, informed NPR. "She needed to be able to work to pay for the education she wanted for her son and her daughter." A year earlier, Dunham had given birth to Obama's half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng. Dunham pledged that she would do her utmost to keep their time apart under one year.

Obama's mom followed through on her promise. However, after Dunham and both her children had lived together in Hawaii for three years, she believed that Indonesia was the best choice for her master's degree research. While she envisioned her two kids with her, Obama preferred to stay in Hawaii with his grandparents.

Looking back, Obama noted the personal impact of these separations. "I think that was harder on a 10-year-old boy than he'd care to admit at the time," Obama informed The New York Times. While he owned his choice to live apart from his mom as a teen, time gave him a new perspective "Being a parent now and looking back at that, I could see ... that would be hard on a kid."

Ann Dunham's father, Stanley Dunham, died in February 1992 due to prostate cancer. Dunham was devastated, and a couple of years later, she was dealing with her own health concerns. However, she was hesitant to seek medical expertise. According to the biography "A Singular Woman," Dunham confided to a friend, "The only thing I'm really afraid of in life is to die of cancer." Sadly, Dunham's symptoms became too significant to disregard. Early medical tests didn't reveal that she had cancer, and one physician mistook her symptoms for appendicitis. By early 1995, however, she was diagnosed with stage 3 ovarian and uterine cancer. She received a hysterectomy and chemotherapy to treat the illness.

Sadly, Barack Obama wasn't with his mom when she died in November 1995. Obama was 34 at the time, and decades later, he spoke about his grief. "I regret not having spent more time with my mother," Obama explained in a 2014 speech (via ABC News). "I realized that I didn't — every single day, or at least more often — just spend time with her and find out what she was thinking and what she was doing, because she had been such an important part of my life."

Dunham also second-guessed her decision not to encourage Obama to visit during her illness, and she had wanted to spend more time with her son over her lifetime. "She had a kind of longing for a closer relationship with him," author Janny Scott informed NPR.

While Ann Dunham was dealing with the stress of being treated for cancer, she also struggled with insurance coverage. Fortunately, she did have health insurance. However, to give herself financial peace of mind, Dunham was trying to access disability benefits. Unfortunately, she was caught in a quagmire of paperwork as she worked to provide documentation to support her case. Meanwhile, the insurance company pushed back, asserting that she wasn't eligible, claiming her diagnosis was a preexisting condition before she had gotten on this particular plan.

To add to her frustrations, Dunham also had to deal with the annoyance of the insurer getting confused about her identity.  Dunham went by a lot of different names in her lifetime, and in this case, there was confusion involving her legal first name, Stanley. Eventually, Dunham's document trail indicates that she told the company she was planning to rely on Barack Obama's legal expertise. However, it's not known if her son ended up dealing directly with the insurer. 

Even so, it made a lasting impression on Obama and he discussed his memories of the events publicly. "I will never forget my own mother, as she fought cancer in her final months, having to worry about whether her insurance would refuse to pay for her treatment," Obama explained during a 2009 town hall (via Politifact). "The insurance company was arguing that somehow she should have known that she had cancer, when she took her new job, even though it hadn't been diagnosed yet."