“My mom Marian Robinson was my rock, always there for whatever I needed,” Michelle wrote on X. “She was the same steady backstop for our entire family, and we are heartbroken to share she passed away today.”
Michelle concluded her personal statement by saying, “We wanted to offer some reflections on her remarkable life” before sharing a link to her family’s joint statement.
In the statement, the family shared that Robinson “had a way of summing up the truths about life in a word or two, maybe a quick phrase that made everyone around her stop and think.” The shared a few of Robinson’s favorites, including:
“Know what’s truly precious.”
“As a parent, you’re not raising babies — you’re raising little people.”
“Don’t worry about whether anybody else likes you. Come home. We’ll always like you here.”
The statement talked about their time at the White House and the staple Robinson became during her son-in-law’s eight years in office.
“With a healthy nudge, she agreed to move to the White House with Michelle and Barack. We needed her. The girls needed her. And she ended up being our rock through it all,” the statement read.
The statement continued, “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.”