Mariah Carey has confirmed the sad news. Her mother, Patricia Carey, 87, and her sister, Alison, 63, have passed away on the same day. The singer has communicated this through a note sent to the magazine Peoplein which she also asks for privacy in these difficult times: “I am heartbroken after losing my mother this past weekend. Sadly, in a tragic turn of events, my sister lost her life on the same day,” she began by explaining. “I am grateful to have been able to spend the last week with my mother before she passed away. I appreciate everyone’s love and support and also the respect for my privacy during this impossible time,” the artist concluded, without revealing further details about the causes of the two deaths.
Patricia Carey, born in 1937 and of Irish descent, was an opera singer and, after retiring, worked as a coach voice. She married Alfred Roy, descendant of a black and Venezuelan community, and they had three children: the eldest, Morgan Carey, born in 1960; the middle one, Alison Carey, born a year later; and finally, the youngest, Mariah Carey, born in 1969. The parents divorced when Mariah was only three years old and the singer Hero In his memoirs he spoke about the complicated relationship he had with his parents, especially with his mother, but also with his two brothers.
It was in The Meaning of Mariah Carey, the autobiographical book that the singer released in 2021, where she revealed some details of her childhood that blew up her family relationships. “As a little girl, I had developed an instinct to sense when violence was coming,” she recounted in the memoir. “I realized that when the screams of adults reached a certain pitch and speed, it meant I had to take cover.” Although there were times when music managed to generate warm moments, Carey identifies her family with violence. “When I was 12, my sister drugged me with Valium, offered me a pinky nail full of cocaine, gave me third-degree burns, and tried to sell me to a pimp,” she said, explaining that for her siblings and her own mother, she began to be treated like “an ATM machine with a wig” as soon as she started to be famous. According to her version, she felt abandoned and all of them “simply tried to make it seem like I was institutionally unstable immediately after I had signed the largest financial agreement for a solo artist.” Her two siblings, Alison and Morgan, sued the singer after the publication of these memoirs.
The interpreter of All I Want For Christmas Is You Mariah Carey also devoted a good part of her memoirs to recounting her relationship with her mother: “Ours is a story of betrayal and beauty. Of love and abandonment. Of sacrifice and survival,” Mariah wrote. “I have emancipated myself from slavery several times, but there is a cloud of sadness that I suspect will always hang over me, not simply because of my mother, but because of our complicated journey together.” Although she did not avoid writing frankly about this relationship, at the time she published her memoirs the singer seemed to have made peace, at least, with herself: “Like many aspects of my life, my journey with my mother has been full of contradictions and conflicting realities. It has never been just black and white; it has been a whole rainbow of emotions.” In fact, Carey dedicated those memoirs to her children, her ancestors and her mother. “And to Pat, my mother, who, despite everything, I believe did the best she could,” she wrote.
And despite all those ups and downs and the brutal honesty of those memoirs, Mariah maintained a relationship with her mother throughout her life. In 2010, they even teamed up for the special Mariah Carey: Merry Christmas to You from ABC, where they performed a song as a duet.
With her sister Alison, however, the relationship was more complicated. After Alison filed a lawsuit following the publication of her biography, the singer responded through her lawyers, saying provided a legal argument. In the document, the lawyers of the winner of five The Grammy Awards defended the artist’s testimony, as it was a matter of public interest and social utility, since it represented “a story of personal improvement in the face of adversity.”
