Inside Mariah Carey’s ‘Painful’ Relationship With Her Mom Amid 2 Deaths in the Family on the Same Day

Mariah Carey’s mom, Patricia

Mariah Carey’s mom is Patricia Carey, an opera singer and the person Mariah attributes to her love of music and singing. She was so talented that she won a scholarship to the prestigious Juilliard School for Music, sang with the New York City Opera, and later became a vocal coach. She eventually retired to raise her three children—Mariah, Alison, and Morgan.

In her memoir, Mariah said her relationship with her mother was a “prickly rope of pride, pain, shame, gratitude, jealousy, admiration, and disappointment,” but despite that, she dedicated the book to her mother. “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,” she wrote.

In 2010, Mariah and her mom sang a medley together for ABC’s Christmas Special and you can definitely see where Mariah gets her pipes. “My mother was definitely the first person who inspired me. She was an opera singer. She still sings,” she told CBS Sunday Morning a year prior.

Mariah Carey’s father, Alfred

Mariah Carey’s father is Alfred Roy Carey. As soon as he was of age, he joined the military.  “My father craved discipline, culture, and freedom, so he joined the military—a logical choice for a man who’d had no say over the time or skin into which he was born,” Mariah wrote in her memoir. He and Patricia married in 1960, but her mother Ann disowned her for marrying a Black man. They divorced in 1973 when Mariah was three.

Mariah would spend most Sundays with him as a child, but that cadence became less frequent as she got older. “Gradually, ‘next Sunday’ turned into a month of Sundays. I had to let go of our Sundays so I could manifest my own day in the sun,” she wrote.

On July 4, 2002, Alfred died after contracting a rare form of bile duct cancer. In a tribute to his memory, Mariah restored his beloved vintage sports car. “The car you never got to finish is lovingly restored, complete with your spirit and my children.. Sorry I never told you, all I wanted to say🌻👐🏾❤️,” she wrote on Instagram at the time.

Mariah Carey’s sister, Alison

Mariah Carey’s older sister Alison died, age 63, on the same day as her mom. According to Times Union, she died in hospice care in Greene County, New York. She is reported to have struggled with substance abuse in the past. “I think that my tolerance level for dysfunction is so high because I grew up in a very dysfunctional environment,” Mariah told NPR in 2006.

Her friend Dave Baker told The Sun that “Alison was on home hospice care for the last three weeks of her life,” he said. “Beneath a tough exterior Alison was a highly intelligent, warm, and sensitive person. I have known her for nine years and as her friend and in recent months her carer I will miss her greatly.” He added, “Farewell Alison. May you now find peace, your tortured soul forever free from earthly pain.”

“For my sanity and peace of mind, my therapist encouraged me to literally rename and reframe my family … Morgan my ex-brother and Alison my ex-sister … I had to stop expecting them to one day miraculously become the … big brother and big sister I fantasized about,” she wrote in her memoir.

“When I was 12 years old, my sister drugged me with Valium, offered me a pinky nail full of cocaine … and tried to sell me out to a pimp,” Mariah explained during The Oprah Conversation in 2020. “Something in me was arrested by all that trauma. That is why I often say, ‘I’m eternally 12.’ I am still struggling through that time.”

Mariah’s brother, Morgan

Mariah Carey’s older brother is Morgan Carey. Not much is known about him, although her memoir alludes to some physical altercations that took place between him and his parents—including one when he shoved her so hard into a wall, she was knocked out.

“Suddenly there was a loud, sharp noise, like an actual gunshot. My brother had pushed my mother with such force that her body slammed into the wall, making a loud cracking sound,” she wrote. “Next thing I knew she was totally limp, as if her bones had melted, folding onto the floor. It was a split second. It was an eternity. My eyes were still fixed in place, only now I was looking at my mother collapsed in a crumpled pile on the floor.”

He filed a defamation suit against her for the allegations, denying that there were ever violent fights in his childhood home. His legal team wrote that Morgan was “a very scrawny child who was born with cerebral palsy, grand mal, and petit mal epilepsy, and a left leg which was several inches shorter than the right.” The suit continued to say he “overcame his disabilities and became as a young man very physically fit” who was featured in men’s fitness magazines.

According to legal documents, he moved to Italy with his wife in 2012 and the defamation suit against his sister, per New York Supreme Court records, is still active.