Talk about burying the lead.
When Margaret Payne of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, died at the age of 87 last week her obituary highlighted her career as a professor, that she wrote academic articles and that she enjoyed traveling. What it didn't call out until the last line of the death notice is that one of her survivors, her nephew, happens to be the President of the United States of America.
"Margaret A. Payne is survived by her brother Charles T. Payne and wife Melanie; her brother Jon V. Payne and wife Susan and friend Margery Duffey. She is also survived by nieces and nephews Richard Payne, Jon Allen Payne, Stacey Gray, Barack Obama and Maya Soetoro."
Payne's sister was Obama's maternal grandmother, making her his great-aunt.
"She was proud of what he did, she was proud of him. But she didn’t make anything of the fact that he was president," Payne's close friend Margery Duffey, who was listed higher than the president in the obit, told the Charlotte Observer.
IN-DEPTH
- UNC Researcher, a Pioneering Academic, Kept Kinship to Obama to Herself (Charlotte Observer)
- The Obituary For Barack Obama’s Great-Aunt Handles Her Famous Relation Perfectly (BuzzFeed)
