Michelle Obama’s mother, Marian Robinson, has died. She was 86. The former First Lady, 60, announced the news Friday via a joint Instagram post with her husband, former President Barack Obama, telling their followers that Robinson “passed peacefully this morning.
” Their caption read, “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.” The couple went on to add, “We wanted to offer some reflections on her remarkable life,” and included several slides that did just that.
The Obamas described the matriarch as full of “wisdom” and “nonjudgemental.” Robinson had the “deep understanding that the world’s roughest edges could always be sanded down with a little grace.” One of seven children, she grew up on the South Side of Chicago.
Her father used to “wake the kids up at sunrise by blasting jazz records as an alarm clock,” so she “learned early that even in the face of hardship, there was music to be found.” She studied to become a teacher before working as a secretary, and she “fell quickly and madly in love with Fraser Robinson, another South-Sider,” with whom she had two children: Michelle and her brother, Craig Robinson. Marian “volunteered for the PTA,” “taught her children to read at an early age” and gave them the “strength and confidence to walk to school — and out into the world — all on th.
