Obama Honors Memory Of Grandmother

December 24, 2008 5:29 a.m. EST

Honolulu, HI (AHN) - President-elect Barack Obama held a private church service for his grandmother on Tuesday in Hawaii, where he is spending the holidays, according to reports.

Obama and family members including his wife Michelle and two daughters attended an hour-long service at the First Unitarian Church in Honolulu for Madelyn Dunham. He later went to a place called Lanai Lookout to scatter her ashes to the sea.

Dunham, a woman from Kansas who worked her way up from secretary to bank vice president while raising Obama until he left Hawaii for college, was known as "Toot" to her family. She died just two days before election night. The president-elect, who suspended his campaign in October to visit her while she was gravely ill, had called her one of the nation's silent heroes in an emotional speech a day before his victory.