Obama attends memorial for his grandmother

HONOLULU -- President-elect Barack Obama spent much of Tuesday honoring the memory of the grandmother who raised him, and then scattering her ashes at Länaçi Lookout on Oahu's rugged southeast coastline, the same spot where Obama scattered the ashes of his mother after her death in 1995.

The White House press corps that¹s traveling with Obama on his third Hawaii visit of the year was not allowed into the First Unitarian Church for a one-hour service in memory of Madelyn Dunham, who died of cancer at the age of 86 just two days before Obama¹s presidential victory.

And media people were not allowed to accompany Obama, his sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, her husband, and Obama¹s immediate family of wife Michelle and daughters Sasha and Malia as they picked their way down to Länaçi Lookout and its wave-swept, rocky shoreline Tuesday afternoon.

Obama scattered the ashes of his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, at the same location after she died of cancer at the age of 53. During a family vacation in August, Obama returned to Länaçi Lookout to toss a lei into the ocean in memory of his mother.

While local and national media were kept at a distance Tuesday, Lauray Gouveia of Kaimukï managed to snap several photos of the Obama entourage of about 12 people that visited the lookout for 20 minutes.

Gouveia suffered her own health scare in May when she came down with pneumonia, and Tuesday she sympathized with Obama¹s emotions.

"To lose someone that close, I felt his pain," she said.

Gouveia wanted to be close to Obama and capture his image but would not allow herself to photograph him scattering his grandmother¹s ashes.

"It's too personal," she said. "It's pono. You¹ve got to do the right thing." Although Secret Service and other law enforcement people kept shooing Gouveia away, she persisted.

"I wanted to see someone who's going to help us help ourselves to make some serious changes," she said. "Thinking about it, it's just chicken-skin. Man, does he have a job and a half to do." Dunham and her husband, Stanley Dunham, raised Obama in their two-bedroom, 10th-floor apartment on Beretania Street while his mother traveled and pursued her graduate studies in Indonesia with his sister.