Michelle Obama’s mother, Marian Robinson, who lived with the Obamas in the White House, died from natural causes. She was 86.
“She passed peacefully this morning, and right now, none of us are quite sure how exactly we’ll move on without her,” the family said in a statement on Friday, May 31.
Robinson was best known as the First Grandmother. She lived in the White House for 8 years and helped care for her granddaughters, Malia and Sasha.
Robinson (left) attended both of Barack Obama’s inaugurations in Washington DC.
The Chicago native raised Michelle and her brother, Craig, in the infamous O-block housing projects, the birthplace of drill rap.
Robinson agreed to move to Washington DC in 2009 to help take care of her granddaughters, who were seven and 10 years old at the time.
“I felt like this was going to be a very hard life for both of them,” she later said in a CBS interview, referring to Barack and Michelle. “And I was worried about their safety, and I was worried about my grandkids. That’s what got me to move to D.C.”
“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 family statement read.
In a CBS interview, Robinson said that it was “a huge adjustment” being waited on by White House residence staff, whom she said she convinced to let her do her own laundry.
The former president once called his mother-in-law “the least pretentious person I know.”
