Mariah Carey’s late sister Alison Carey passed away on August 24 at the age of 63.
Now, her friend David Baker, who knew her for nine years, is opening up to People with more details about her passing, explaining that she “had a tough life” before dying at her home in Coxsackie, New York.
“We saw it coming, but it’s still a shock. She got ill fairly quickly and a month later, she’s gone,” he said.
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He met her in 2015, when Alison suffered a serious brain injury during a home invasion while living on Long Island, New York. She was hospitalized there, but was ultimately transferred upstate. And while in physical rehab, she was hospitalized once again after suffering a brain hemorrhage. Her brother Morgan reached out for help in a Facebook group that he was a part of, looking for someone in the area who might be able to visit her.
“I knew when I saw the request that I was the only person anywhere near Albany, New York, so I said, ‘Well, I’m going to go for this.’ They eventually sent me to the hospital and I met Alison.”
“I saw somebody who needed help and I knew I could do it. She’d tell me that she was so glad I was around. More recently, before she got sick, if I went somewhere for an hour, she’d call and say, ‘When are you coming back?’ And I’d say, ‘Well, I’ll be there in 20 minutes.’ And then she’d call a second time and say, ‘When are you coming back?’ Because short-term memory was affected by the brain injury,” he recalled.
David previously revealed in early August that Alison had entered hospice, and he had helped her find her final apartment in Coxsackie, New York, where she’d lived for the past three years. While there was talk of putting her in a nursing home prior to the move, he offered to help her out.
“She got her wish. She died in her own home,” he said. “Alison was a highly intelligent, very sensitive person.”
Alison was a mother of four, three sons and one daughter. Her children visited two or three weeks ago, including her daughter, who lives nearby and had been visiting daily, according to the report.
Mariah and Alison had a rocky relationship, and Alison wasn’t sure when they last saw each other, according to her friend.
Mariah wrote in her memoir that it was “emotionally and physically safer for me not to have any contact” with her or their brother Morgan.
Their mother Patricia died on the same day as Alison. Here’s what Mariah Carey said.
