According to a family statement exclusively shared with NBC News, Marian Robinson, Michelle Obama’s mother, passed away today at the age of 86. The statement was from Michelle and Barack Obama, Craig Robinson and his wife, Kelly, and Robinson’s grandchildren, Avery, Leslie, Malia, Sasha, Austin, and Aaron.
“She passed peacefully this morning, and right now, none of us are quite sure how exactly we’ll move on without her,” the family statement said.
Obama took to Instagram to memorialize her mother with a detailed family statement that read, “Marian Lois Shields Robinson – our mother, mother-in-law, and grandmother – had a way of summing up the truths about life in a word or two, maybe a quick phrase that made everyone stop and think. 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 public became familiar with Robinson when her son-in-law, Barack Obama, won the 2008 presidential election. Throughout the Obama administration, she was admired for her warm and loving spirit and her decision to move into the White House from her hometown of Chicago to help care for her two granddaughters, Sasha and Malia. She reflected on her mother’s sacrifice in her book The Light We Carry, asking her mother for help in the White House and leaving the South Side. “I’d enlisted Craig (Michelle Obama’s brother) to twist her arm further. My mother was the rock of our family. She steadied us all. Since the time our daughters were babies, she’d help us out around the edges of our regular childcare arrangements.”
Our forever First Lady was very close to her mother and often attributed her success to her. She once said she was “the woman who taught me how to think for myself.”
On Mother’s Day this year, Obama posted a beautiful picture of her mother on Instagram with a sweet message: “My mom has always been my rock, and I’m so grateful for all the ways she continues to show up for my family. She’s taught me so much over the years, and I feel so lucky to pass that same wisdom down to my own girls.”
A recent exhibit in the Obama Presidential Center Museum is currently under construction in Jackson Park and will be named in honor of Marian Robinson. Upon announcing the exhibit, she wrote, “But above all else, my mother gave me nonstop, unconditional love in so many ways. She fostered in me a deep sense of confidence in who I was and who I could be by teaching me how to think for myself, how to use my own voice, and how to understand my own worth. I simply wouldn’t be who I am today without her.”
We are lifting the Obama and Robinson families in prayer as they mourn their loved one.
