Mariah Carey has confirmed a tragic family loss as her mother Patricia and sister Alison both passed away on the same day over the weekend.
“My heart is broken that I’ve lost my mother this past weekend. Sadly, in a tragic turn of events, my sister lost her life on the same day,” the Grammy-winner told People in a statement.
“I feel blessed that I was able to spend the last week with my mom before she passed,” she added. “I appreciate everyone’s love and support and respect for my privacy during this impossible time.”
The singer did not provide any further details about her mother’s or sister’s cause of death.
Patricia, who divorced the late Alfred Roy Carey in 1973, was an opera singer and vocal coach before giving birth to her first child. Meanwhile, Alison has faced significant personal obstacles, including periods of homelessness, and has been disconnected from her famous sibling for a number of years.
Mariah Carey has previously opened up about the complex relationship she had with her mother and described it as a ‘rainbow of emotions’ in her memoir.
Writing in her 2020 tome The Meaning of Mariah Carey, she said: ‘Like many aspects of my life, my journey with my mother has been full of contradictions and competing realities.
“Our relationship is a prickly rope of pride, pain, shame, gratitude, jealousy, admiration, and disappointment. A complicated love tethers my heart to my mother’s.”
Mariah and her mother, did record a festive duet of O Come All Ye Faithful and Hallelujah Chorus in 2010.
In her memoir, Mariah Carey wrote about her complex relationship with her elder siblings, brother Morgan Carey and sister Alison Carey. She mentioned that at the time, it was “emotionally and physically safer for me not to have any contact” with either of them.
In 2020, Mariah sat down for a conversation with Oprah Winfrey and claimed of Alison: “When I was 12 years old, my sister drugged me with valium, offered me a pinky nail full of cocaine, inflicted me with third degree burns and tried to sell me out to a pimp.”
She reasoned that her siblings were “damaged,” and continued: “We don’t even really know each other, and that’s the thing. We didn’t grow up together, but we did.”
“Like, they were on their journeys, by the time I got into the world, they had already been damaged, in my opinion. But again, I wasn’t there. I was dropped into this world and I literally felt like an outsider amongst my own family.”