Mariah Carey recently shared that both her mother, Patricia, and older sister, Alison, passed away on the same day this past weekend at ages 87 and 63, respectively.
“I’ve lost my mother this past weekend. Sadly, in a tragic turn of events, my sister lost her life on the same day,” Carey said in a statement to People. “I feel blessed that I was able to spend the last week with my mom before she passed. I appreciate everyone’s love and support and respect for my privacy during this impossible time.”
Carey’s relationship with her mother, who worked as a Juilliard-trained opera singer, was complicated. In her 2020 memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, she described their connection as “full of contradictions and competing realities.”
“It’s never been only black-and-white — it’s been a whole rainbow of emotions,” she wrote, per People. “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.”
According to BBC, Carey wrote in her memoir that jealousy “comes with the territory of success, but when the person is your mother and the jealousy is revealed at such a tender age, it’s particularly painful.”
In 2010, they performed a duet of “O Come All Ye Faithful/Hallelujah Chorus” during ABC’s Mariah Carey: Merry Christmas to You special.
Despite their rocky relationship, Carey always gave her mother credit for encouraging her to pursue music and exposing her to various styles.
In The Meaning of Mariah Carey, the diva also wrote in great detail about her sister Alison, saying it’s “emotionally and physically safer for me not to have any contact.”
Carey also has an older brother named Morgan, but they no longer have any contact with each other. In 2022, she lost her father, Alfred Roy Carey, to cancer.
