Mariah Carey has said her “heart is broken by the loss of her mother” and that, tragically, the singer’s older sister also passed away on the same day. She was seen performing last year in Los Angeles.
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Singer Mariah Carey has announced a family tragedy, saying her mother, Patricia, and sister, Alison, recently died on the same day.
“I am heartbroken to have lost my mother this past weekend,” Carey said in a statement released Monday. “Sadly, in a tragic turn of events, my sister lost her life the same day.”
Carey said she was happy to have been able to spend the past week with her mother, who reportedly moved to an assisted care facility in Florida several years ago. Carey’s sister, Alison, died in upstate New York, according to local media reports.
“I appreciate everyone’s love, support and respect for my privacy during this impossible time,” she added. News of the two women’s deaths was first reported by People magazine.
The pop superstar did not provide details on the cause of her death. Patricia Carey was 87, according to public records.
Alison Carey died at age 63 in a hospice in Greene County, New York, south of Albany, according to the Times Union. The newspaper quoted David Baker, a friend of Carey’s who helped her with housing and welfare issues, as saying her death was caused by organ dysfunction. She reportedly struggled with drug addiction.
Carey, 55, said she has a complicated relationship with her family, describing her youth as a source of recurring instability. She linked her past to the very public emotional struggles the singer endured even as her career reached rare heights.
“I think my tolerance level for dysfunction is very high because I grew up in a very dysfunctional environment,” Carey told NPR in 2006.
Carey had maintained a bond with her mother, including singing a Christmas medley together in 2010 and spending time with Carey’s young children. But she was reportedly estranged from her sister, who sued Carey over allegations about her in the singer’s 2020 memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey.
Describing her mother as a neglectful parent, Carey said in her memoir that Patricia, who was white, fueled her childhood insecurities in a variety of ways, including not taking care of her biracial daughter’s hair. But she also credited her mother — a former opera singer who trained at Juilliard — with encouraging her to sing and explore her talent.
In her memoir, Carey also claimed that her older sister repeatedly put her in dangerous situations, including giving Mariah drugs when she was 12.
According to reports, Carey’s mother moved to a retirement home in West Palm Beach, Florida, in 2020. A year later, Carey sold the Westchester County, New York, home she had purchased for her mother in the 1990s.
