The Tragedy Of Barack Obama's Mother Ann Dunham Is So Sad

Ann Dunham raised not only a future president of the United States but one who broke barriers and made history as the first Black American to ever occupy the Oval Office. But she sacrificed a lot to do so. Barack Obama's childhood was spent watching his mother struggle to make ends meet while simultaneously striving to prosper as an academic. None of it was easy, but it was perhaps Dunham's hardships that allowed her to raise an equally determined man.

Dunham became a single mother just two years after giving birth at 18. After Obama's parents divorced, he only saw his father once when he was 10 years old, but his mother still shared nothing but positive stories about Barack Obama Sr. with her son. That wouldn't be the only time Dunham was left to raise a young child on her own. When she and her second husband separated, Obama's half-sister, Maya Soetoro, was also a toddler.

But Dunham never let the struggles get in the way of fighting for what she thought was best for her children. And for her, their education was a priority. Dunham made the hard choice to live apart from her 10-year-old son so that he could get what she considered to be the education he deserved. That determination remained present through her tragic end. She died from cancer in 1995 while fighting with her insurance company to get the medical care she needed. Watching his mother carve her own path with never-ending resilience served as Obama's biggest inspiration. 

Ann Dunham was barely out of her teens when her husband left her to raise their 2-year-old son on her own. Barack Obama's mother had him at 18, only to become a single parent when she was 20. That reality contrasted starkly with the Dunham her family and friends — and even the younger Obama — knew her to be. Up until meeting Barack Obama Sr., she had shown no interest in domestic life, showing ambition to become an academic instead.

The sudden change didn't go unnoticed. "She was a very intelligent, quiet girl, interested in her friendships and current events," her friend Maxine Box told Time in 2008. "She wasn't particularly interested in children or in getting married." But she fell in love and subsequently fell pregnant, leaving her no choice but to be the best mother she could be to Obama with limited means. After Obama Sr. left them behind to go to Harvard University, Dunham went back to school and graduated four years later.

To make it happen, she relied on her parents to help with her son and on government assistance to put food on the table. She became an anthropologist whose research took her halfway across the world to Indonesia. Her struggles, hard work, and determination proved crucial in the making of Obama. "My mother, Ann Dunham, was the biggest influence on my life. She had a core belief in our common humanity," he captioned a 2022 video shared on Instagram.

Ann Dunham moved to Indonesia with her second husband, Lolo Soetoro, when Barack Obama was 6 years old. For four years, she made the sacrifices she thought necessary to ensure that her son received a proper education. In her mind, that included complementing his studies at the local school with English lessons at home. For that to happen, she had to rise before the sun and get her son to do the same so she could teach his correspondence course before sending him off to school.

But even with all those efforts, Dunham still thought Obama was being deprived of the education she had been lucky enough to receive — one she wanted her son to also have. After years of that routine, she decided Obama would be better off returning to the U.S. while she stayed behind another year. It was a hard decision, but Dunham saw no other way.

She had an Indonesian husband, a 1-year-old daughter she couldn't live behind, and a son who needed to go back home. "She was juggling a number of things," biographer Janny Scott, author of "A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother," told NPR in 2011. Dunham kept her promise to Obama and joined him in Hawaii, where he had been living with his grandparents, in 1972. When she returned to Indonesia to complete anthropological fieldwork a few years later, her high schooler son opted to stay behind. 

Ann Dunham died of ovarian cancer in 1995, just months after receiving the diagnosis earlier that year. Those final months weren't spent doing what she should have been doing — taking care of herself and trying to grapple with her diagnosis. "[She was] more worried about paying her medical bills than getting well. She wasn't thinking about coming to terms with her own mortality," Barack Obama said in a 2007 campaign ad (via Chicago Tribune).

Dunham was diagnosed shortly after she returned to the U.S. after completing her work in Indonesia. She had a new employer and was newly insured. Would her insurance company consider her cancer a pre-existing condition and deny coverage of her expensive, but indispensable, treatment? These were the questions on Dunham's mind. "I remember just being heartbroken, seeing her struggle through the paperwork and the medical bills and the insurance forms," Obama said.

When his mother was diagnosed, Obama had been writing "Dreams from My Father," the 1995 memoir in which he delved into his identity as a Black man whose Black father had walked away. In hindsight, he somewhat regretted having focused so much on his father instead of his mother. "I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her illness, I might have written a different book — less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life," he prefaced the book.

When Ann Dunham fell pregnant with Barack Obama and agreed to marry Barack Obama Sr., she believed he had divorced his first wife, Kezia Aoko. She later learned that wasn't the case. "He had told me they were separated, but it was a village wedding, so there was no legal document that could show a divorce," she told Obama for "Dreams from My Father." That was part of the reason Obama Sr.'s family opposed his relationship with Dunham.

That didn't mean Obama Sr. and Aoko weren't separated, but divorce was uncommon in Luo culture. "You could get a divorce but you had to go through a very complex process which involved the couple sitting before a council of elders and then there had to be a return of the dowry," Sally H. Jacobs, author of "The Other Barack: The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obama's Father," told NPR in 2011.

Even if Obama Sr. and Aoko had mutually agreed to split, the lack of proper documentation was seemingly a sore point. His immigration files included a memo in which his student adviser noted he probably had two wives. His wedding to Dunham happened when he was trying to renew his visa, and he became even more worried when Dunham got pregnant. "The last thing they were going to look kindly on, if they chose to see it this way, was a bigamist with a mixed-race baby," Jacobs said.

When Ann Dunham fulfilled her promise to Barack Obama to join him in the U.S. in 1972, she left Lolo Soetoro behind. They remained married for several years but would never live together again. He visited the family frequently but that was the extent of their physical contact. In 1980, Dunham filed for divorce a second time, seeking no child support. She didn't cut ties with her ex and encouraged Maya Soetoro to have a relationship with her father.

That didn't mean she didn't have any negative feelings attached to the marriage and its end, but she wasn't one to hold grudges. "She was no Pollyanna. There have certainly been moments when she complained to us," Maya told Time in 2008. "But 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." But it wasn't just distance that made Dunham and Lolo grow apart.

Lolo's involvement with oil companies in the early '70s caused tension in the marriage. Dunham disliked the lifestyle and the influence the culture had on him, Maya told The New York Times. That, coupled with the 1965-66 Indonesian mass killings that forced Lolo to return home from the U.S. to fight for the government, took a toll. "Power had taken Lolo and yanked him back into line just when he thought he'd escaped," Obama wrote in "Dreams from My Father."