Honolulu: President-elect Barack Obama attended a memorial service here for his late grandmother, who helped raise him in Hawaii and died in early November.
Obama, his family and friends attended a private service for Madelyn Payne Dunham, whom her grandson affectionately called "Toot," at the First Unitarian Church in the Honolulu neighborhood of Nuuanu.
An Obama spokesman told reporters that the president- elect's wife Michelle and his half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng, along with her husband Konrad Ng, were at the service yesterday.
Obama then scattered his grandmother's ashes at a highway pulloff overlooking the ocean in a private ceremony, the spokesman said. More than a dozen people attended.
The overlook, known to locals as Lanai Lookout, was the same site where he tossed a garland into the ocean in August in memory of his mother, Ann Dunham, who died in 1995.
Obama's grandmother died on November 2, just two days before he was elected the first African-American president of the United States. Obama had rushed to his grandmother's side two weeks before she died, fearing she would not witness what became his victory.
"She was the cornerstone of our family, and a woman of extraordinary accomplishment, strength, and humility," Obama said in a joint statement with his sister in November.
"She was the person who encouraged and allowed us to take chances ... Our debt to her is beyond measure."
