“I appreciate everyone’s love and support and respect for my privacy during this impossible time,” says Mariah
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Mariah Carey’s mom Patricia and sister Alison died on the same day over the weekend, PEOPLE can confirm.
“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,” the Grammy-winning singer, 55, said in an exclusive statement to PEOPLE.
“I feel blessed that I was able to spend the last week with my mom before she passed,” adds Mariah. “I appreciate everyone’s love and support and respect for my privacy during this impossible time.”
No other details, including Patricia and Alison’s causes of death, are known at this time.
Patricia, who was previously married to Alfred Roy Carey, was a Juilliard-trained opera singer and vocal coach before the couple welcomed Alison, Mariah and son Morgan. The parents later divorced when the “Hero” singer was 3 years old.
Mariah’s relationship with her mother — from whom her vocal talents were inherited — was complicated throughout her life.
“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,” she 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,” continued Mariah in the book. “A complicated love tethers my heart to my mother’s.”
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Despite their ups and downs, Mariah maintained a relationship with her mother. In 2010, they came together for ABC’s Mariah Carey: Merry Christmas to You special and performed a festive mother-daughter duet of “O Come All Ye Faithful/Hallelujah Chorus.”
Mariah also dedicated her memoir in part to Patricia. “And to Pat, my mother, who, through it all, I do believe actually did the best she could,” she wrote. “I will love you the best I can, always.”
Mariah’s relationship with Alison was also quite complex. The star wrote in the memoir that it was, at least at the time, “emotionally and physically safer for me not to have any contact” with her or Morgan.
