Carly Simon Mourns Her Sisters, Who Died a Day Apart

As a child, Carly Simon stammered. Her mother suggested she sing what she couldn't quite say, and her sisters, Joanna and Lucy, accompanied her in encouragement. "At dinner we wouldn't just say, 'Please pass the salt, thank you,' Lucy Simon later said. "We'd sing it." Two-thirds of the group that began singing at the dinner table and once performed as the Simon Sisters died this week, the New York Times reports. Joanna Simon, who built an international career as an opera singer, died Wednesday of thyroid cancer in Manhattan at age 85. Lucy Simon, a performer and composer who won two Grammys and was nominated for a Tony Award, died the next day in Piermont, New York, of metastatic breast cancer at 82.

"I am filled with sorrow," Carly Simon, who became a pop star after the sisters retired their folk-rock act, told CNN in a statement. "We were three sisters who not only took turns blazing trails and marking courses for one another, we were each other's secret shares. The co-keepers of each other's memories." The girls had a brother, Peter, a photographer who died in 2018. He had been diagnosed with lung cancer, per Yahoo Entertainment. "We all came out singing," Lucy Simon once said. "And we kept on singing." (More obituary stories.)