Mariah Carey’s mother, Patricia, and sister, Alison, both died on the same day, the singer said Monday.
“My heart is broken that I’ve lost my mother this past weekend,” the Grammy-winning singer said. “Sadly, in a tragic turn of events, my sister lost her life on the same day.
“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.”
Details about their causes of death were not immediately available. People Magazine first reported the news of their deaths and Carey’s statement.
Patricia was an opera singer and was previously married to Alfred Roy Carey, the singer’s father. The parents divorced when the singer was three years old.
Carey detailed her complicated relationship with her mother and her sister in her 2020 memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, in which she wrote that she and her mother often clashed, and she accused her sister of putting her in unsafe situations as a child.
“Our relationship is a prickly rope of pride, pain, shame, gratitude, jealousy, admiration and disappointment,” Carey wroter of her mother in the book. “A complicated love tethers my heart to my mother’s.”
Of her sister, she wrote that, for a time, it was “emotionally and physically safer for me not to have any contact” with her.
Still, Carey maintained contact with her mother and they even recorded a duet of O Come All Ye Faithful/Hallelujah Chorus for the singer’s second Christmas album in 2010.