A source tells PEOPLE that the late Sen. John McCain's mother "did not go to Arizona," but knew he was "very ill" and "recently spoke to him on the phone" John McCain's Mom, 106, Is 'Proud' of His Legacy — But It's 'Tough' to 'Bury Your Child': Source Sen. John McCain made a huge impact on countless people before his death — especially his 106-year-old mother, Roberta McCain. A close McCain family friend tells PEOPLE that Roberta is “incredibly proud” of her middle child, the longtime politician and decorated war veteran who lost his battle to stage-four brain cancer at the age of 81 on Saturday. Get push notifications with news, features and more. “Roberta was his biggest supporter and the leader of his fan club. She was incredibly proud of him,” the source says. “His mommy loved him. He knew that.” As Roberta grieves the loss of her son, the source points out that she “is a very strong woman,” noting the centenarian’s age as proof. “She is all there, mentally, and is still going strong at 106,” the friend tells PEOPLE. “She outlived her 81-year-old son. That tells you a lot. But it’s a tough blow to bury your child.” Meet The Press Credit: Alex Wong/Getty The insider adds that while Roberta did not travel to Arizona following Friday’s news that her son would be ceasing medical treatment for glioblastoma — the most aggressive form of brain cancer, with which he was diagnosed in July 2017 — the two did speak on the phone recently, and she knew the extent of Sen. McCain’s illness. “I can only imagine what she’s going through,” the friend says of Roberta through tears. CAMPAIGN-MCCAIN Sen. John and Roberta McCain in 2008 | Credit: Erik Campos/The State/MCT/Getty The source tells PEOPLE that Roberta and Sen. McCain’s first wife Carol still keep in touch and have frequent conversations. (The two divorced in 1980 after 15 years of marriage and share three children: sons Douglas and Andy and daughter Sidney.) “John never stopped loving Carol,” the insider says, adding that the exes spoke regularly before Sen. McCain’s death. A close family friend revealed exclusively to PEOPLE on Friday, “Roberta is 106, but she’s spunky. She knows he is ill.” McCain 2008, Downingtown, USA Roberta McCain in 2008 | Credit: Matt Rourke/AP/REX/Shutterstock RELATED VIDEO: Senator John McCain Dies at Age 81 Roberta has been a vocal supporter of her son’s political efforts over the years. At 96 years old, during Sen. McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, she gave a speech to campaign workers, captured by CSPAN. “Johnny is going to be the president of the United States and he’s going to keep the traditions … and the standards high,” she told the crowd, receiving applause. “All we want is a world where we can raise our children, have a chance at prosperity and happiness, and we can vote any way we want to,” she continued before ending on a sweet note. “I can’t thank you enough … I wish I could kiss each one of you on the cheek. If I get a chance, I will.” Republican Convention, St. Paul, USA - 4 Sep 2008 Roberta and Sen. John McCain in 2008 | Credit: Paul Sancya/AP/REX/Shutterstock PEOPLE spent time on with Roberta on Sen. McCain’s campaign bus during his presidential campaign in 2007. At one point, Roberta, then 95, teased her son, “I want to correct you when you start telling all those big lies.” When the conversation turned to the “Straight Talk Express” campaign bus itself — “This is wonderful! Can you imagine me comfortable on a bus?” Roberta said — Sen. McCain asked his mother to regale the group with a story about a driving mishap in Arizona. “It’s so dumb!” she began. “I was driving across the continent [in 2003] and had 300 miles to Los Angeles. I thought, well, I can make it tonight. So I put the gas on. I got a ticket for driving 112 miles per hour, signed my name and went on my way.” When her granddaughter Meghan McCain, then 23, praised her for the tale, Roberta responded, “Honey, I shoot my mouth off like a neophyte!” Roberta spoke earnestly about her son, too, during the interview. “I think civilization depends on this election,” she told PEOPLE. “Johnny should have been dead 10 times already. Not just when he was a POW in Vietnam. He had so many near-misses [as a naval aviator]. He was saved for some reason.” In an emotional tweet following Sen. McCain’s death, his wife Cindy, 64, wrote, “My heart is broken. I am so lucky to have lived the adventure of loving this incredible man for 38 years. He passed the way he lived, on his own terms, surrounded by the people he loved, in the place he loved best.” His daughter Meghan McCain was among the people praising Sen. McCain on social media in the wake of his death. “In the thirty-three years we shared together, he raised me, taught me, corrected me, comforted me, encouraged me, and supported me in all things,” she wrote in part.<doc-sep>Although John McCain passed away just shy of his 82nd birthday, his mother Roberta still called him Johnny. Sen. John McCain was a decorated war veteran and six-term Arizona Republican senator who made a run at the presidency twice. His mother still called him “Johnny.” “I should call him John,” Roberta McCain said in an interview with C-SPAN during her son’s 2008 presidential campaign. She never did. We look at our sons, men by chronological age, and we see them. We are proud of who they have become, marvel at it really. But we also still see the adorable baby, and the sweet boy, and the scamp of a teenager. No matter how old our kids get, they are that. Our kids. Roberta McCain is 106, living in Washington, D.C., where she has said she likes that the museums are open every day and admission is free. People magazine reported that McCain’s mother knew her son had stopped treatment for a brain cancer in the days before his death. She would have known what was coming. But then, Roberta McCain had been told her boy was dead one time before. In 1967, she answered a phone in a London hotel room to learn her son’s A-4 Skyhawk had been shot down over North Vietnam. There was no indication that the pilot had ejected safely. Roberta McCain had been sure Johnny was dead, she said in a 2008 interview with C-SPAN. “Reality is reality,” she said. Her boy was gone. Then came the good news that Johnny was a prisoner of war. Yes, she said in that interview, the good news. Because it was not the worst she could imagine. Her boy was alive. Her faith sustained her through the next 5½ years until her son came back, thin and limping but unbelievably alive. Her boy was home. Even though he was grown, she was still mom. In that same interview, Roberta McCain recalled how she had read an article about his brutal treatment in captivity, years later. It described how he had shouted expletives at his captors. She telephoned her son. "Johnny," she said. "I'm going to come over there and wash your mouth out with soap.” Her boy was 60. John McCain often said his mom was the greatest influence on his life. Strong-willed and a seasoned traveler, when she was told she was too old to rent a car in Paris in 2006, she bought one instead. She made the most of any situation. Clearly, he learned from her example. He survived captivity, torture, embarrassing scandal and losing a presidential bid, twice. Then he was diagnosed with brain cancer. Instead of lament, he wrote in his final book: "What an ingrate I would be to curse the fate that concludes the blessed life I've led." A blessed life, even in dying. As Roberta McCain remarked in her 2008 interview: “It depends on where you are standing, how things affect you."<doc-sep>Roberta McCain, Sen. John McCain’s 106-year-old mother, attended a ceremony at the U.S. Capitol on Friday honoring her son’s life. Roberta came in to the Capitol Rotunda before 11 a.m. on a rainy morning in Washington, sitting in the front row in a black and white blouse as the flag-draped casket of her son was brought in. Vice President Mike Pence and Second Lady Karen Pence paid their respects to Roberta when they arrived, stopping by her seat and touching her hand and shoulder as they spoke to her. Roberta held hands with her granddaughter Meghan McCain during speeches by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Pence, as Meghan wiped away tears. After the speeches, Roberta paid her respects at her son’s casket, making the sign of the cross before she was wheeled away. John McCain is just the 31st person to have the posthumous honor of lying in state at the Capitol Rotunda. Friday’s ceremony was attended by notable figures including members of Congress, former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and actors Annette Bening and Warren Beatty. President Donald Trump was not in attendance. Roberta has been slowed by a stroke which now makes speaking a “chore,” John McCain wrote in a book published this year, the Associated Press reports. But he wrote that her “vivaciousness is a force of nature” and that she still has “a spark in her, a brightness in her eyes that would light up the world if she could resume her peripatetic life.” The Senator referenced his mother’s “peripatetic life” is because she used to love taking adventurous trips around the world, often with her twin sister. Roberta told TIME in 2000 that she’s “like a little turtle” in her journeys. “I just bring a little pair of boots, a raincoat, an umbrella and my binoculars and set out,” she said. In the same interview, she talked about her special bond with her son John. “That poor soul,” she said. “I do think he’s an awful lot like me–too emotional.” John McCain died last Saturday of brain cancer at age 81. Get our Politics Newsletter. The headlines out of Washington never seem to slow. Subscribe to The D.C. Brief to make sense of what matters most. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check the box if you do not wish to receive promotional offers via email from TIME. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Write to Tessa Berenson at tessa.berenson@time.com.<doc-sep>
WASHINGTON (AP) -- John McCain's rebellious streak didn't come out of nowhere. His mother, Roberta, had a habit of speeding behind the wheel and racking up tickets. When told during a trip to Europe that she was too old to rent a car, she went out and bought a Peugeot. Her son once answered the telephone to hear his mother say she was on a cross-country driving trip — by herself, in her 90s. Now 106, the wife of a Navy admiral and mother of a Navy captain lived a life full of travel and adventure, punctuated by her sass and determination. She once said her son liked to hold her up as an example of "what he hopes his lifespan will be." But in the end, she is mourning him instead of the other way around. Though slowed by a stroke, she is expected to attend memorial and burial services in Washington and Maryland later this week for the middle son she called "Johnny," the Vietnam prisoner of war, congressman, senator and two-time presidential candidate who died of brain cancer on Saturday at age 81. The senator said in one of his books that "my mother was raised to be a strong, determined woman who thoroughly enjoyed life, and always tried to make the most of her opportunities. She was encouraged to accept, graciously and with good humor, the responsibilities and sacrifices her choices have required of her. I am grateful to her for the strengths she taught me by example." McCain's father, too, had a penchant for living large, with the senator recalling that a predilection for "quick tempers, adventurous spirits, and love for the country's uniform" was encoded in his family DNA. A native of Muskogee, Oklahoma, Roberta Wright was nearly 21 and a college student in southern California when she eloped to Tijuana, Mexico, in January 1933 with a young sailor named John S. McCain Jr. He would go on to become a Navy admiral, like the father he shared a name with, and the couple would have three children — Jean, John and Joseph — within a decade. Story continues With her husband away on Navy business most of the time, Roberta McCain raised the kids. She didn't complain, and loved Navy life. The family lived in Hawaii, the Panama Canal Zone — where the senator was born in 1936 — Connecticut, Virginia and many points in between. "To me, the Navy epitomizes everything that's good in America," she told C-SPAN in 2008 during the presidential contest John McCain lost to Barack Obama. John McCain followed his father and grandfather's footsteps into the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, where he'll be laid to rest on Sunday. He became a fighter pilot and joined the combat action in Vietnam. He was on his 23rd bombing run over North Vietnam when he was shot out of the sky and taken prisoner in October 1967. His parents were in London getting ready to attend a dinner at Iran's embassy when a special phone that Roberta McCain says she never touched rang while her husband was in the shower. She answered and listened as a friend told her two planes had been shot down and none of the pilots had ejected. She told her husband when he came out of the shower, and they kept to their plans. "We went and decided we were not going to say one word at this dinner," she said in the 2008 interview. She said that later learning her son was alive and had become a prisoner of war was "the best news I ever had in my life." Roberta McCain missed watching her son's release from Vietnam on television in 1973. Someone telephoned and told her to watch the TV, something she said she did little of. "These people came off and the television stopped, so I turned off the television," she explained. "I didn't know that between ads he did come off ... and I missed it." She later said she was "ashamed" of her son for the "terrible language" he used toward the Vietnamese captors who tortured him. "I never would have believed in this world he would ever use language like that, but he did," Roberta McCain said in the interview, which was conducted at her Washington home.