Madonna gets candid about childhood tragedy that forced her to ‘grow up’

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As a child growing up in Michigan, Madonna suffered a tragedy that she says likely altered the entire course of her life.

In the Sky documentary Becoming Madonna, the superstar speaks about losing her 30-year-old mother, Madonna Louise Ciccone, to breast cancer in 1963.

“What happened you know when I was [5] years old, it was just the greatest event of my life,” Madonna said in an archival clip, People reported. “It was like a part of my heart was ripped out.”

The singer, 65, noted she was “forced to grow up fast” and had to work through the psychological effects of her “beautiful and sweet” mother’s passing. “It was too much for a child I think,” she said.

Last spring, Madonna shared on Instagram her final memory before receiving the tragic news: her ailing mother waving goodbye from a hospital window. “I stepped into the station wagon and shut the door not knowing it was the last time I’d see her,” she wrote. “Nobody told me my mother was dying — I just watched her disintegrate mysteriously, and then she disappeared, and there was no explanation except that she had gone to sleep, which explains my tumultuous relationship with sleep.”

Madonna has opened up in the past about her mother’s death. In a 1989 interview with Rolling Stone, she said, “If she were alive, I would be someone else. I would be a completely different person.”

The same year, the Queen of Pop told the Chicago Tribune that, despite the passing, her mother would have wanted her daughter to keep moving forward with her life. “I don’t think she ever allowed herself to wallow in the tragedy of her situation,” Madonna noted. “So in that respect I think she gave me an incredible lesson.”

Madonna recently lost two of her seven siblings to cancer — brothers Christopher Ciccone, 63, in October 2024, and Anthony Ciccone, 66, in February 2023. The entertainer’s stepmother, Joan Ciccone, also died from cancer at age 81 in September 2024.

Madonna’s father Silvio Ciccone celebrated his 93^rd birthday last June.