The Obama campaign said on Monday that the Democratic presidential candidate will take off two days from his campaign to go to Hawaii this week, to visit the ailing grandmother who helped raise him.

Obama is canceling events, scheduled for Thursday, in Madison, Wisconsin, and Des Moines, Iowa. Instead, he instead will go to an event in Indianapolis, Indiana, on Thursday, from where he will fly to Hawaii to see his grandmother. He will return to the campaign trail on Saturday.

Robert Gibbs, an Obama aide said that Illinois Senator’s grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who will be 86 on Sunday, is critically ill, and “in the last few weeks her health has deteriorated to the point where her situation is very serious.”

Refusing to divulge on the nature of her illness, Gibbs said that Senator Obama will be visiting her “so that he can see her and spend some time with her.”

Obama often makes references to his grandmother on the campaign trail, and she has always featured prominently in his stump speeches. In fact, during his nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in Denver, the Senator had mentioned his grandmother saying that “she poured everything she had” into him.

Mrs. Dunham, whom Obama called “Toot”, worked her way up in Hawaii from the secretarial pool to a managerial job at a Honolulu bank. Along with his mother and his grandfather, his grandmother helped raise the candidate in Hawaii from the time he was born until the moment he left for college, at times taking the lead nurturing role when his mother was working in Indonesia.

This summer, Senator Obama vacationed with his grandmother, saying she had reached an age when he wanted her to spend as much time as possible with her great grand children, his daughters, Malia and Sasha.