STANLEY ANN DUNHAM
'Most generous spirit'
Obama has called her death of ovarian cancer at age 53 the worst experience of his life and said, "The biggest mistake I made was not being at my mother's bedside when she died.
"She was in Hawaii in a hospital, and we didn't know how fast it was going to take, and I didn't get there in time," Obama told the Sun-Times in 2004.
His white mother was born Stanley Ann Dunham, named after her father -- "one of Gamps's less judicious ideas," Obama wrote in his book.
With the help of her own parents -- and food stamps for a while -- Dunham raised Obama when his father returned to Kenya, and her second marriage to an Indonesian also ended in divorce.
Obama has written about her waking up early to give him extra lessons while in Indonesia and always making sure he was secure in his racial identity.
In a new preface to the re-release of Dreams From My Father in 2004, Obama called her "the single constant in my life.
"I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her," he wrote.
Stanley Ann was a cultural anthropologist. Obama described her as "a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism."
Her mother, Madelyn Dunham, has said that Stanley Ann considered herself "an Adlai Stevenson liberal."
Obama and his mother were always close -- "extraordinarily so, I would say," Madelyn Dunham said in a 2004 interview. "They understood one another."
Obama's half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng has described their mother as "a great romantic."
"She travelled all over the world and would only see the good in each place that she went," Soetoro-Ng said in 2004, adding that her half-brother's book captured "both her eternal hopefulness and her sense of adventure, her fun-loving spirit, but also her naivete at times."
Soetoro-Ng remembered when she and Obama spoke about their late mother at Soetoro-Ng's wedding shortly after the 2004 Democratic National Convention. They spoke of all she had missed -- grandchildren, Obama's "meteoric ascent in politics," Soetoro-Ng's career and wedding.
"And he did tear up a little," Soetoro-Ng said. "In spite of everything, I saw . . . the guy who, you know, really wished that his mommy could be around."