Odd: Obama told reporters that his grandmother Madelyn Dunham was struggling from osteoporosis in Aug 2008

Barack Obama is a poker man, but his grandmother's game of choice is bridge. Duplicate bridge, to be exact. In poker, a good player can still bluff his way through a lousy hand. In duplicate bridge, different sets of players are made to play the same hands multiple times -- accentuating the players' skill while reducing the element of luck. Madelyn Payne Dunham never taught her "Barry" how to play bridge, yet she gave him the tools to BLUFF his way and get elected president.

She's also the "white grandmother" cited in Obama's speech on race. The woman who, though she loved him "as much as she loves anything in this world," once confessed "her fear of black men who passed by her on the street" and who was capable of uttering "racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."

But it was another incident, one to which he was a party, that had a most profound effect on the biracial teenager.

Toot had asked her husband for a ride to work because a particularly aggressive panhandler had accosted her for money the day before. When Stanley refused, his grandson couldn't understand why.

"She's been bothered by men before," his grandfather explained, according to the memoir. "Before you came in, she told me the fella was black. That's the real reason why she's bothered."

Obama described the words as "like a fist in my stomach." It was a life-changing moment for him.

"Never had they given me reason to doubt their love; I doubted if they ever would," he writes. "And yet I knew that men who might easily have been my brothers could still inspire their rawest fears."

Obama referred to the incident again in spring 2008 when racially charged comments by his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, forced him to make what many now consider a seminal speech on race relations in America.

"I can no more disown him," he told an audience in Philadelphia in March, "than I can my white grandmother -- a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."


In August, during a family vacation in Honolulu following his Democratic Party nomination, Obama told reporters that Dunham was struggling from osteoporosis that limits her mobility. He did not mention she had cancer. On Oct 21,2008 , Dunham's brother, Charles Payne, who is Obama's great-uncle, told the Associated Press from his Chicago home that Dunham, who turns 86 on Sunday, "has not been well for a long time. Then she fell and broke her hip fairly recently. She's unhappy with the condition that she's in, I can tell you that." Again no mention of any cancer.

Relative says Obama's grandmother broke her hip and is 'gravely ill'

Madelyn Dunham, the woman who raised Barack Obama, died of cancer Nov 3,2008 on the eve of his election as president of the United States.