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By Root 978 0

For the first time, microfinance seemed to have emerged front and center in the world’s attention. Nina Nayar, Ann’s young protégée from Women’s World Banking, returned from China via India, then flew to Honolulu to see Ann. Ann’s mane of dark hair was gone. But she was ornamented, as always, for the occasion. “The turban becomes you,” Nayar marvelled affectionately. “I think it’s even more majestic.” As Nayar recalled that visit, she and Garrett Solyom hoisted Ann into a wheelchair and set off on one last field trip. After all, it was Nayar’s first visit to Hawaii. They picnicked at sunset and tried Ann’s favorite Hawaiian foods. At Ann’s insistence, they made their way up to the Nu‘uanu Pali State Wayside, where the trade winds climb the windward cliff of what remains of the Ko‘olau volcano and roar through the Pali Pass as though through a funnel. There, not far from the tunnels that carry traffic through the mountain and from one side of O‘ahu to the other, there is a panoramic view of the green Nu‘uanu Valley, Kaneohe Bay, and the beach town of Kailua. Struggling with the wheelchair against the wind and trying to keep Ann’s headgear from taking flight, Nayar remembered, she and Solyom maneuvered Ann into the optimal spot. “It was the same feeling as we had on top of the pyramid,” Nayar said. “It was probably a parting gift for both of us.”

In early November, during a collect call to her mother on a pay phone near the NYU campus, Maya noticed that Ann sounded momentarily confused.

“You know what, Mom?” she later recalled saying. “I’m coming. I’ll work it out. I’ll do whatever papers I have left. I’m coming. I’ll see you there very soon.’

“She said, ‘Okay,’” Maya remembered. “And I told her I was scared. And she said, ‘Me, too.’ And then, ‘I love you.’

“And that was it.”

On November 7, Maya flew to Honolulu, unsure of what she would find. Ann was unconscious and emaciated. To Maya, she appeared to be starving. But she was alive, as though she had waited. Maya took Madelyn’s place by Ann’s bed in the hospital room so that her grandmother could go home. Then she talked—about all that Ann had given her, about how she would be remembered with love. Maya had brought with her a book of Creole folktales, which she had been reading with her students as part of a study of origin myths. She began reading aloud. In one story, a person was transformed into a bird. Then the bird took flight.

“I told her finally that she should go, that I didn’t want to see her like that,” Maya remembered. “And she was gone about fifteen minutes later.”

For Barack, not being at his mother’s bedside when she died was the biggest mistake he made, he would say later. He was at home in Chicago when he got word. He had last seen Ann in New York City in September, and had last spoken to her, he told me, several days before her death, before she lost consciousness. “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,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2004.

Word spread quickly. Dick Patten got the news in Burma, where he was working on a project for the United Nations Development Programme—trying to help the Burmese people, as he would later put it, without helping the Burmese government. Don Johnston, whom Ann had discreetly nudged into domestic happiness, got the news in Indonesia in the field. Made Suarjana, at his typewriter in his office in Bali, wept when Maya called. In a private ceremony, he told me, his family offered prayers to help deliver Ann’s spirit to the next world. In Colorado, Jon Payne asked the priest in his church to include his niece in the congregation’s prayers. After all, as far as Payne could tell, Ann had been doing what Christians always said saints did—helping people. “She wasn’t a particularly religious person, if at all,” Payne said. “But she did more things for people than a lot of Christians do.”

In Jakarta, Julia Suryakusuma made an impromptu altar out of a table and a Balinese mirror in the living room of Gillie Brown’s house on Jalan Gaharu in Cilandak.