The death of Alison Carey
Final wishes and a distant family
Posted Sept. 12, 2024
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.
******
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.
****
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.
****
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.
****
“Farewell Alison. May you now find peace,
your tortured soul forever free of earthly pain.”
************************
