Mariah Carey’s mother, Patricia, and sister, Alison, died on the same day over the weekend, the pop star announced. It was unclear what caused their deaths or when exactly they died.
“My heart is broken that I’ve lost my mother this past weekend,” Carey said in a statement. “Sadly, in a tragic turn of events, my sister lost her life on the same day.”
Carey said that she had been able to spend the last week with her mother, adding, “I appreciate everyone’s love and support and respect for my privacy during this impossible time.”
Patricia Carey, who was previously married to Alfred Roy Carey, was a Juilliard-trained opera singer and vocal coach. She and Alfred Carey, who was half Venezuelan and half Black, had two daughters, Alison and Mariah, and a son, Morgan Carey. Alfred Carey died in 2002.
Over the years, Mariah Carey, 55, has described the challenges she faced as a biracial child growing up on Long Island, New York. She wrote more extensively about them in her 2020 memoir, “The Meaning of Mariah Carey.”
She dedicated the book to her twins, Monroe and Moroccan Cannon, and her mother, writing: “And to Pat, my mother, who through it all, I do believe actually did the best she could. I will love you the best I can, always.”
Carey, who established herself as one of pop music’s leading stars since emerging in the early 1990s, wrote that her relationship with her mother and siblings was fraught, saying that she at times felt like “an ATM with a wig on” to her family.
At one point, when Mariah Carey was exhausted, she sought refuge at a cabin she had purchased for her mother, who responded by calling the police. “She gave them an odd, knowing look,” Carey wrote, “which felt like the equivalent of a secret-society handshake, some sort of white-woman-in-distress cop mode.”
The singer wrote that, like many aspects of her life, her relationship with her mother had been “anything but simple.”
“Our relationship is a prickly rope of pride, pain, shame, gratitude, jealousy, admiration and disappointment,” Carey wrote. “A complicated love tethers my heart to my mother’s.”
It was through singing that she often found a connection to her mother. Together they performed “O Come All Ye Faithful/ Hallelujah Chorus” in 2010 on Carey’s Christmas special on ABC.
Carey’s relationship with Alison, her sister, was also strained. Alison Carey died at her home in Greene County, New York, more than 130 miles north of New York City, according to The Times Union. The Times Union said she was 63.
Mariah Carey wrote in her memoir that at age 12, her sister had drugged her with Valium, offered a pinkie nail full of cocaine, inflicted her with third-degree burns and tried to sell her to a pimp.
Carey wrote that she felt “emotionally and physically safer” not having any contact with her siblings.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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