Mariah Carey is mourning the loss of her mother Patricia and her older sister Alison, who died on the same day over the weekend, the pop star said.
“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,” Carey, 55, told multiple outlets.
“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,” she added.
No other details were provided, including Patricia and Alison’s causes of death or the exact date of their passings.
Patricia was reportedly 87 years old when she died. She was a Juilliard-trained opera singer and vocal coach who helped inspire Carey to pursue singing.
“Well, my mother tells a story,” Carey told CBS’ Sunday Morning in 2009. “She said that she was doing Rigoletto, and she kept rehearsing one part over and over and over. And then, she messed up. And I said, ‘No, it goes like this,’ and sang it to her.”
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Carey said her mother decided, “‘OK, she definitely has a special ear. And let me encourage this.’”
But the mother and daughter also had a complicated relationship over the years.
“Like many aspects of my life, my journey with my mother has been full of contradictions and competing realities. It’s never been only black-and-white — it’s been a whole rainbow of emotions,” Carey wrote in her 2020 memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey.
“Our relationship is a prickly rope of pride, pain, shame, gratitude, jealousy, admiration and disappointment,” the singer continued. “A complicated love tethers my heart to my mother’s.”
The memoir was dedicated in part to Patricia, “my mother, who, through it all, I do believe actually did the best she could,” Carey wrote.
The singer’s relationship with her sister Alison was also strained. Carey wrote in her 2020 memoir that, at the time, it was “emotionally and physically safer for me not to have any contact” with Alison or her brother Morgan.
Alison sued Carey in 2021 for intentional infliction of emotional distress caused by the memoir, claiming that her sister used the book as a means “to humiliate and embarrass” her, CNN reports. Carey never filed a legal response to the lawsuit.
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