Mariah Carey has revealed that both her mother Patricia Carey, who was very proud of her Irish roots, and sister Alison died on the same day over the weekend.
"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," Mariah said in an exclusive statement to PEOPLE on Monday.
"I feel blessed that I was able to spend the last week with my mom before she passed," Mariah added.
"I appreciate everyone’s love and support and respect for my privacy during this impossible time."
Patricia was 87 and Alison was 63.
PEOPLE reported that no other details, including Patricia and Alison's causes of death, are known at this time.
Mariah had a complicated relationship with her parents Patricia Carey (née Hickey) and Alfred Roy Carey, as well as her two older siblings, Morgan and Alison.
With her mother being white and Irish American and her father being half-Black and half-Venezuelan, Mariah was also subject to racism from early on, sometimes from within her own family. Indeed, Patricia, whose parents were reportedly from Co Cork, was "disowned" from her family after she married Alfred, a Black man, in 1960.
The mother and daughter opened up about their experience dealing with racial discrimination as an interracial family - including having their dog poisoned and having someone shoot their window - in a powerful interview with Oprah Winfrey in 1999.
In 2009, Mariah told The Guardian: "White people have a difficult time with [mixed race].
"It's like, my mother's white – she's so Irish, she loves Ireland, she's like, yay, Ireland! Waving the flag and singing 'When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.' And that's great. I appreciate that and respect it.
“But there's a whole other side of me that makes me who I am and makes people uncomfortable. My father identified as a Black man. No one asked him because he was clearly Black.
"But people always ask me. If we were together, people would look at us in a really strange way. It sucked. As a little girl, I had blond hair and they'd look at me, look at him, and be disgusted."
View this post on Instagram
Later, in her 2020 memoir "The Meaning of Mariah Carey," Mariah described her and her mother's relationship as "anything but simple."
Still, the Grammy winner wrote: "A complicated love tethers my heart to my mother's.″
Dedicating her memoir in part to her mother, Mariah wrote: "And to Pat, my mother, who, through it all, I do believe actually did the best she could. I will love you the best I can, always.”
In her memoir, Mariah wrote: "To a certain extent, I know how my mother became who she is. Her mother certainly didn’t understand her.
"And her father never had a chance to know her; he died while her mother was pregnant with her.
"My mother was known as the 'dark one' because her hair wasn’t blond and her eyes were a mix of brown and green, not pure blue like her brother’s and sister’s.
“Blue eyes were a symbol of the purity of whiteness, and being of 100% 'pure' Irish descent was central to her mother’s entire identity.
“To my mother’s mother, all 'others' were below the Irish. But Black? Black people were always at the absolute bottom of the order.”
Happy Mother's Day to my mom, Patricia and to all the Mommies in the land! Wishing you a beautiful day full of love ❤️ pic.twitter.com/p44N7n0hkz
— Mariah Carey (@MariahCarey) May 12, 2019
Mariah further wrote: "My mother not only ignored the moral code of her hometown, she rebelled against it, later becoming active in the civil rights movement.
"Young Patricia had big dreams — many of which she realized.
“She was extremely gifted and driven.
“Winning a scholarship to the prestigious Juilliard School for music, she would go on to sing with the New York City Opera. My mother built an exciting, artsy, bohemian life in New York City.
“She was in the downtown scene and dated a diverse cast of men by whom her mother would have been mortified.
“Her pure Irish Catholic mother wouldn’t approve of her dating anyone who wasn’t lily-white. An Italian guy would have been a problem, a Jewish man, a tragedy.
“My grandmother would’ve come completely undone if she knew my mother had had a steamy affair with a rich, older Lebanese man before she fell in love with, and married, a man her mother could not even conceive of.
“My father. A beautiful, complicated Black man.
“Talking to a Black man was considered a shame; befriending one, an outrage; carrying on with one, a major scandal, but marrying one?"
In 2021, Mariah launched her own made-in-Ireland Irish cream liquor brand Black Irish as a "nod to her heritage."
Comments