RIP Alison

 The death of Alison Carey

Final wishes and a distant family

By David Baker
Posted Sept. 12, 2024

    Few people like being a patient in a hospital and Alison was no exception. Every time she was hospitalized I would get calls from her saying, in a loud urgent whisper: “I can’t stand it! Get me out of here!”

   This wasn’t helping her recovery or the nurses who answered her frequent pressing of the call button:  They were glad when I arrived because, they said, Alison would be calm once I was there.

   So during each of her hospitalizations I would spend as much time as possible with her.  And although we didn’t know it until just before she was discharged after a brief stay at the end of July, she was near the end of her life.  She went home to her apartment on hospice care and died there three weeks later. 

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    Alison was cremated - which she did not want. 

    Or was she?  I don’t know because none of her family members have told me. 

    Two days after she died she was taken from a funeral home near her apartment in Coxsackie to another funeral parlor near her childhood home on Long Island.  Beyond a suggestion by her youngest child that she might be cremated I know nothing about her final resting place.  So, was she cremated?  Or was she buried?  If so, where? 

     I tried to find out from one of her sons, asking in a text about her final arrangements and pointing out that no one had asked me if I knew of Alison wishes. His response?  “I’m not comfortable commenting on that.” 

   Then, showing the deep loss he feels for his penniless departed mother,  he continued:  “As far as all of her children know there was no will so all of her belongings pass to her next of kin. We’re gong to be  making arrangements to pick up her things but please be sure everything is still there.  Phone, papers etc.” 

    My choice would have been to donate her newer clothes to Goodwill, which is where she bought many of them, and what is left to to a recycling organization.  But sure, you can have them, along the rest of her “things”  

  If there wasn’t a funeral, what about a memorial service?  In an earlier text he wrote: “…there’ll be a private family ceremony for her.’ 

  In the words, I’m not invited.  Get lost.

   Real callous to someone who had been offering support to Alison constantly since 2015 and was with her right to the end.

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   There’s a reason we have funerals; it allows relatives and friends to say goodbye to the person one last time an acknowledgement that helps people accept that he or she has gone.

   It’s also why there is usually a marked headstone where the remains are buried.  It’s why the remains of people who die abroad are brought home, to rest in a 6 -foot by 3-foot piece of ground that belongs exclusively, forever, to the departed person.  Tangible, visible evidence that the person existed.

   But apparently there will be none of that for Alison.  Just her ashes - and who knows what will happen to them.

   So Alison is removed from the face of the earth by some of her family members who, before last month, hadn’t seen her in years and evidently now just want to forget she ever existed.

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   There’s another story this week  - this one in  Life & Style magazine - about how Mariah Carey regrets not getting in touch with Alison before she died.

   A “source” (almost certain to have been instructed by Mariah) is quoted saying: “Everyone’s focused on how guilty she should feel, but the reality is there’s a tremendous amount of sorrow over what might have been if her sister hadn’t gotten addicted to drugs.”

   Yes, and if as a child she hadn’t been subjected by her Satan-worshipping mother to unspeakable psychological and sexual abuse  - which is what caused her to seek an escape from the horrific childhood memories and led to her being diagnosed with  PTSD -  post traumatic stress disorder.

   Alison came home from the hospital to go on home hospice care on July 31 and I began giving her a prescribed dose of morphine every two hours around the clock.  That evening, I sent a text to one of Alison sons.  When he called back I told him that Alison was close to the end of her life.

    By the next day all of Alison’s children would have been informed, and at least one of them would have ben able to contact Mariah.

   Additionally, without any way of contacting Alison’s sister directly, on August 3 I sent a public tweet tagging Mariah that said Alison was on home hospice care.

   On August 10, all four of Alison’s children showed up - unannounced - at Alison’s home.  None of them, including the one believed to be closest to Mariah, said anything about Mariah wanting to contact her dying sister, even though it is virtually certain that by then she knew that Alison was near the end of her life. 

   Mariah may now be feeling guilty.  But if so, it would surely be because she hadn’t spoken to Alison since 1994 - despite her father’s dying wish that she do so - and evidently didn’t attempt to reach the sibling she publicly dismissed as her “ex-sister” even after learning that Alison was close to her death.

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“Farewell Alison. May you now find peace,

     your tortured soul forever free of earthly pain.”

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Last wishes denied

 Father and daughter: At the end of

their lives, both had the same request

By David Baker
August 29, 2024

   Last week Alison Carey was close to death. 

   Back in 2002, Alfred Roy Carey, father of Alison and Mariah, also was close to death. He, like Alison was not in a hospital but in a private home, on medications to keep him comfortable. And as Alison did 22 years later, he had a last request.  

    In the chapter in her memoir titled Father and the Sunset, Mariah wrote: 

   “His dying wish was that my ex-sister Alison and I would speak again.”

   Alison had come to her father’s bedside, and Mariah goes on to write that  “…for a limited time, we were able to be in the same room.” But there’s no indication in the book that the two spoke, then or since.

   Twenty two years later, Alison was the one close to death, with the same longing. But it was not to be. Unwilling to move past a destruction of trust she claims happened 43 years ago, Mariah has now denied forever the last wish of both her father and her sister.

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Life expectancy

    The news that Alison's mother died on Saturday, the same day as Alison, is another twist in the Carey family story. 

   Here, from a post here two years ago is Alison's thoughts about her mother, her childhood, and dying. 

End of life will mean decisions for the family

By David Baker
Feb. 22, 2022

   Alison Carey is 60 years old. Her mother, Patricia Carey, turns 85 this week and has been reported to be in declining physical and mental  health.

   Alison realizes that she will probably never see her mother again. She has mixed feelings about that.

  “She is an evil woman,” Alison says. “Nobody should be subjected to what she did to me when I was a child.”

    Alison was referring to being taken by her mother to terrifying 2 a.m. satanic rituals, where she was sexual abused.

   “But she is my mother. Sometimes I think I would like to speak to her, to ask her why she did it.  But most of the time I never want to see her again.”

   Patricia is reportedly living in a high-end facility in Florida with a team of aides to assist her. Alison is not sure that when her mother dies she will be told.

   With her own deteriorating health, Alison also thinks about the end of her life.  She says she often wonders if anyone will be at her funeral. She assumes none of her family members will be there. And certainly it would be the height of hypocrisy if they attend after ignoring her for the latter part of her life, particularly since 2015 while she has struggled with a serious brain injury that left her with permanent damage to her short-term memory and vision.

   Alison also wonders if the family will pay for her funeral. Coming up with the money after she was gone would also be hypocritical. But refusing to do it would look bad, too. Either way, the decision will likely generate another set of headlines.

*** 

Farewell Alison

 

Alison Ann Carey,

 August 7, 1961-August 24, 2024

COXSACKIE, N.Y.  -- Alison Ann Carey passed away at her home in Coxsackie, N.Y.  on August 24, 2024.

   Alison was born on August 7, 1961 in NewYork City. She was the daughter of Patrica Ann (Hickey) Carey and the late Alfred Roy Carey. 

   Alison grew up in Huntington, Long Island, moving to the Capital Region in 2015.

   In addition to her mother, Alison is survived by three sons, Shawn, Michael and Dominic, and a daughter, Carmela; also by a brother, Morgan and a sister, Mariah.

    A cause of death was not given.

   Funeral arrangements will be private at the convenience of the family.

   Farewell Alison. May you now find peace, your tortured soul forever free from earthly pain.

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Life changing abuse

   Following  Alison's death last week, this page will be rerunning  previous stories about her, in particular ones describing the childhood abuse that affected the rest of her life. 
   This one was first published in 2018.

Hall of unspeakable horrors

For decades, Alison Carey has said little about the horrific abuse she endured as a child. But now, struggling with the debilitating effects of a brain injury, broke and abandoned by her family, she is ready to speak out. 

By David Baker
First posted October 15, 2018

   One of Alison Carey’s earliest memories - she was probably under 5 years old - is of the castle.
   It’s not really a castle. But to a small child, taken there in the dead of night, the huge building with the turrets could look like a castle.
   It was there, Alison says, that Satanic rituals, led by her mother, Patricia, took place.
   She says she remembers people wearing hooded cloaks, standing in a circle and chanting.
   There was sexual activity. And then there were the sacrifices, which the participants believed would please the deity they were there to worship.
   Asked if she had seen a sacrifice, Alison was silent for a moment. And then, with a pained expression on her face she said, “Yes.”
   Alison was not expected to be just a spectator; She says she was to be trained to run what she calls the group.
   At first, a small child would not understand what was happening. But as she grew older, she began to comprehend the horror of it, and that it was something most children were not exposed to.
   Her recollection of the castle checks out. She describes it as being in Huntington on Long Island, close to a church and near water.
   A check of Google Earth shows a large building off of Browns Road with turrets on the roof. It stands close to Huntington Bay. It’s called Coindre Hall. Next to it is a Unitarian Universalist Church, and behind the church is the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Huntington.
   Asked why no one in authority - law enforcement, or public officials - had stopped the abuse, Alison had a simple but highly disturbing reply. “Because some of them were a part of it,” she said. “They were in the group.”
   Life at home also was traumatic. Her parents were constantly fighting. She says her mother was frequently drunk, and her brother Morgan, a year older than her, terrorized the family, at one point pouring gasoline on the floor outside the room Alison was in, forcing her, with infant Mariah on her back, to escape out a window.
   Later, at the age of 11 after her parents separated, Alison went to live with her father, Alfred, while Mariah stayed with their mother. But she says she would be back with her mother on some weekends and holidays - and that she continued to be made to attend the rituals.
   It was about that time Alison says that she started to repress the memories. Her psyche did this -  as is common with people who have suffered extreme emotional trauma - by creating a new identity, one that had no memory of the distressing events. She now struggles with post traumatic stress disorder - the same condition suffered by military personnel who have witnessed unspeakable atrocities in combat.
   The result is a conflicted person, one who is uneasy with herself. And as many like her have done, she turned to drugs to escape.
In April 2015 she was in her apartment on Long Island when, she says, a stranger entered the home, demanded her jewelry, threw her down a flight of stairs and hit her in the back of the head with a baseball bat.
   She spent the following four months in hospitals. Then in August, after being transferred to a rehab facility she collapsed and, in another hospital, had brain surgery and was put on life support, not expected to survive.
   She pulled through. But the attack has left her with permanent brain damage, impairing her short-term memory and her vision.
   Now 55 years old, Alison has been in a drug-addiction recovery program since February 2016. She goes regularly to a support group. She is working hard to turn her life around.
   But all this seems to matter little to her family. Her mother, less than two hours away, didn’t come to the hospital when Alison was on life support and near death in Albany, N.Y. and hasn't contacted her since. Her eldest son, a Harvard-educated corporate lawyer, has repeatedly refused to help her since she was attacked. In September, a celebrity gossip magazine quoted “a source” as saying that after footing the bill several times for rehab, Mariah Carey has decided to cut Alison off.
   And Morgan, her brother has repeatedly used Mariah’s fame and Alison’s misfortune to promote himself. Three times he has gotten international media attention with increasingly sensational rants; calling his younger sister ‘an evil witch”, and later, “a monster” in separate newspaper stories and in September telling a syndicated TV show he fears Mariah will have him physically attacked for speaking out. Then he tried to persuade Alison not to meet with the producer of the TV show he had just been on. He wanted all the attention himself.
   “But it’s not his story,” Alison says. “It’s my story.”
   It is. And now, down but not out, Alison Carey is ready to share it.

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davidbaker@fastmail.com
Twitter: @DavidFBaker