“I am grateful for the outpouring of love, support, and respect for my privacy during this incredibly difficult time,” Mariah Carey expressed.

PEOPLE has confirmed that the mother of Mariah Carey, Patricia, and her sister Alison passed away on the same day recently.

“In profound sorrow, I must convey that I lost my mother over the weekend. In an unimaginable twist of fate, my sister also departed this world on that very day,” the 55-year-old Grammy winner confided exclusively to PEOPLE.

“I’m thankful for the precious last week I got to spend with my mom,” Mariah Carey continues. “The love and backing from everyone, and the privacy granted, mean the world to me during this unfathomable period.

The specifics surrounding Patricia and Alison’s deaths, including the causes, are not currently available.

Patricia, once married to Alfred Roy Carey, was an opera singer and vocal coach trained at Juilliard before Alison, Mariah, and their brother Morgan were born. The couple separated when Mariah, the singer of “Hero,” was three.

Mariah Carey’s bond with her mother, from whom she inherited her vocal prowess, was intricate throughout her life.

“In my life, as with many things, my path with my mother was riddled with contrasts and clashing truths. It’s never been just shades of grey — it’s been a spectrum of feelings,” she reflected in her 2020 autobiography, The Meaning of Mariah Carey.

“Our bond is a tangled cord of pride, hurt, remorse, thankfulness, envy, regard, and disillusionment,” Carey wrote further in the book. “A complex love binds my heart to my mother’s.”

Despite the fluctuations, Mariah Carey maintained ties with her mother. In 2010, they reunited for ABC’s Mariah Carey: Merry Christmas to You and performed a memorable holiday duet of “O Come All Ye Faithful/Hallelujah Chorus.”

Mariah Carey also dedicated a part of her memoir to Patricia. “To Pat, my mother, who, through everything, I truly believe did her utmost,” she penned. “I will cherish you as best I can, forever.”

The relationship with Alison was similarly complex. Carey noted in her memoir that, at least at that time, it was “emotionally and physically safer for me to have no contact” with Alison or Morgan.