Celebrity Members of "The-Club-That-No-One-Wants-to-Belong-To" . . .

Madonna was just 5-years old when her mom died from breast cancer.  "My mother's death left me with a certain kind of loneliness, an indelible longing for something.  Madonna addresses the devastating loss in her song, Mother and Father.  

My mother died when I was five
And all I did was sit and cry
I cried and cried and cried all day
Until the neighbors went away

They couldn't take my loneliness
I couldn't take their phoniness
My father had to go to work
I used to think he was a jerk

I didn't know his heart was broken
And not another word was spoken
He became a shadow of
The father I was dreaming of

I made a vow that I would never need
Another person ever
Turned my heart into a cage
A victim of a kind of rage

Finding it hard to grasp at the time, Madonna has blamed her self-disciplined, uptight persona on her childhood pain and referred to it as “one of the hardest things I've faced in my life”.

Madonna

New Jersey native, Chelsea Handler was 10-years old when older brother, Chet, died in a tragic  hiking accident.  "That experience was a defining moment in my life,”  “I was only 10, so my brother and sisters were, like, ‘Don’t even worry about her.  She doesn’t even know what was going on.’  But of course I knew what was going on.  I was so close with my brother.”  Handler fondly recalls taking care of Chet when he would come home from engineering school.  “I was, like, 7 or 8, and I would make him cereal when he would come home late from school, from college, and I would put it in a bowl and act like I made him dinner, and look after him.”  “He would always come upstairs to my mom’s bedroom and be like, ‘Where is she? Where is she?’ I would be under the bed and he’d grab me and he’d drag me down the stairs while I was kicking and screaming. We played that game all the time.”  “You have all these beautiful memories, and that’s enough sometimes.”

Chelsea Handler

Blake was 14-years old when his older brother, Richie, died in a car accident.  Shelton looked up to him. "And I would be sitting there going, 'Man, that guy's my hero. That's the coolest guy. He’s my big brother.'  About a week after his death, "I was picking up the phone to call him, to tell him something I just saw on TV, and it was like constantly a shock to me that he was dead."  Blake's song "Over You", recorded by his ex-wife Miranda Lambert, was inspired by his brother.  Shelton refers to it as one of the proudest moments of his career.  Some of the lines from the song came right from Shelton's experience, like the part about getting his brother's record collection.  "That's one of the things I got when my brother was killed,"  "The family gave me all his albums and things like that. I just listened to them over and over again to feel like he was there."

Blake Shelton

Maya, a Saturday Night Live alumni, was two weeks shy of her 7th birthday when her mom, well-known singer Minnie Riperton, died from breast cancer.

Maya Rudolph

A native of Flushing, New York, Jon was 13-years old when his mother, an elementary school teacher, died from leukemia.  You may recognize him best as "Mike" from the movie "Swingers" ("You are SOOO money"), but did you know he is also the Executive Producer for such mega Hollywood hits as The Iron Man films and The Avengers?

Jon Favreau

Former NY Islander and current Calgary Flame hockey player Travis Hamonic was only 10 years old when his dad died from a heart attack. "I would trade in every that I ever played, every game that I ever WILL play in the NHL just for one shift of him being able to watch me play . . . and for me to be able to talk with him after the game about it."  See Travis' grief story documented in the E:60 profile, "In the Name of the Father."

Travis Harmonic

Grammy and American Music Award-winning artist, Marc Cohn, blasted onto the music scene in 1991 with his Grammy-nominated hit "Walking in Memphis." What most people don't know about him is that Marc was parentless while still in middle school.  His mom passed away when he was 2 and his dad died when he was 12.  Said Cohn, “I was an orphan, basically in a way no-one ever could have expected. I think that’s quite clearly why all these ghosts, literally ghosts, appear in my music. I feel like I never really knew the most important people in my life.”

Marc Cohn