Marian Robinson, former President Barack Obama’s mother-in-law, died Friday at the age of 86, according to the family.
ABC called her “a fixture in the Obama White House [who] resided there during his tenure to help watch over the first couple’s daughters, Sasha and Malia.”
“She passed peacefully this morning, and right now, none of us are quite sure how exactly we’ll move on without her,” a family statement said, according to NBC.
The family statement said Robinson left Chicago with “a healthy nudge.”
“We needed her. The girls needed her. And she ended up being our rock through it all,” they said.
“She relished her role as a grandmother. … And although she enforced whatever household rules we’d set for bedtime, watching TV, or eating candy, she made clear that she sided with her ‘grandbabies’ in thinking that their parents were too darn strict,” the statement said.
The statement said she preferred privacy to pretense.
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“Rather than hobnobbing with Oscar winners or Nobel laureates, she preferred spending her time upstairs with a TV tray, in the room outside her bedroom with big windows that looked out at the Washington Monument,” the statement said.
“The only guest she made a point of asking to meet was the Pope,” the statement said.
NBC said the family statement came from Michelle and Barack Obama; Craig Robinson and his wife, Kelly; and Marian Robinson’s grandchildren, Avery, Leslie, Malia, Sasha, Austin and Aaron.
“Her wisdom came off as almost innate, as something she was born with, but in reality it was hard-earned, fashioned by her deep understanding that the world’s roughest edges could always be sanded down with a little grace,” the family statement said, according to ABC.
“My mom Marian Robinson was my rock, always there for whatever I needed. She was the same steady backstop for our entire family, and we are heartbroken to share she passed away today,” Michelle Obama wrote in a post on social media platform X.
“One of my biggest blessings is getting to see my granddaughters grow up before my eyes. My job here is the easiest one of all: I just get to be Grandma,” Robinson wrote in a 2012 essay for Essence.
Robinson said in the role of grandmother, “I do everything that grandmothers do that they’re not supposed to,” according to The Washington Post.
“I have candy, they stay up late … they watch TV as long as they want to, we’ll play games until the wee hours,” she said.
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