A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [118]
In The Audacity of Hope, Obama describes his mother, despite her professed secularism, as “in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I’ve ever known.” Without religious texts or outside authorities, he says, she worked to instill in him the values that many Americans learn in Sunday school. She possessed, too, “an abiding sense of wonder, a reverence for life and its precious, transitory nature that could properly be described as devotional.” She would occasionally wake him in the middle of the night, as a child, he writes, to look at the moon or have him close his eyes as they “walked together at twilight to listen to the rustle of leaves. . . . She saw mysteries everywhere and took joy in the sheer strangeness of life.”
In the late summer of 1986, Ann arranged for Maya to fly to Jakarta, on her way back to Hawaii from Pakistan, to visit her father. Lolo Soetoro had been hospitalized in Jakarta with the liver disease that had been diagnosed a decade earlier when Maya was a small child. Though Ann had been led to believe by his doctors, during his hospitalization in Los Angeles, that the disease would cut short his life, Lolo had lived another seven years. Now he was gravely ill. Maya, having just turned sixteen, flew by herself to Jakarta, where relatives met her at the airport and took her to the home of her uncle Trisulo. Lolo, released from the hospital, spent a week with her in Trisulo’s house. He was more talkative than Maya had remembered. He asked about her school, her favorite subjects, and her friends. He brought photographs of himself that he wanted her to keep. There were moments of affection and tenderness. But their time together felt awkward to Maya. “I felt a teenage resentment that he hadn’t been present in a more meaningful way and that he had left the rearing of me to Mom,” she remembered later. “I was sort of feeling like I wanted him to be sorry about that.” Later, she would come to regret not having stayed longer. But she had been away from Hawaii for three months, and she was impatient to go home. It never occurred to her that her father might be dying—and that he might know it. Afterward, she wrote him a long letter from Hawaii and tried to send it in time to reach him before his birthday on January 2. She wanted them to have a meaningful relationship, she told him in the letter; she wanted to know him better. But the letter was waylaid in the Christmas rush, she told me, and did not arrive as planned. In the meantime, a family member telephoned from Indonesia to say that Lolo had fallen into a coma. In early 1987, he died.
The house in Menteng Dalam, to which Maya and Ann had returned from Hawaii in 1975, went to Maya (and was sold some years later, with the proceeds going to help pay for her graduate-school education). To protect Maya’s rights, Ann stopped in Jakarta on her way home from Pakistan the following November. The house was being rented by Dick Patten, whom she had gotten to know while she was working on the provincial planning project in Central Java in 1979 and 1980. Patten, who had extensive experience in credit systems in Indonesia, had gone on to work as a consultant to one of the largest banks