Melissa Etheridge finally broke her silence following her 21-year-old son’s death and shared that, at one point, she told herself she couldn’t “save him.”
“As the mother of someone who was addicted to opioids, it’s a struggle,” the 59-year-old singer shared with Rolling Stone magazine in a piece published Thursday. It came after losing her son, Beckett Cypher, from causes related to opioid addiction back in May. (RELATED: Hollywood Reacts To Death Of Legendary Actress Doris Day)
“You want to help your child,” she added. “You want to make them all better. He was a young adult. There were things out of my control, of course.” (RELATED: Legendary Comic Don Rickles Died At Age 90)
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Etheridge continued, noting that “there came a time when I needed to really sit down with myself and say, ‘I can’t save him. I can’t give up my life and go try to live his life for him.'”
“And I had to come up against the possibility that he might die,” the “Come to My Window” hitmaker went on to share. “But I had to be able to go on living. Of course it’s nothing a parent ever wants. But as a human being, I just needed to be at peace with a troubled son who did the best he could, who believed what he believed and then his life ended way, way too soon.”
At one point, the Grammy-award winning singer admitted there “will always be that place in my heart and my soul that has a little bit of, ‘Oh, what could I have done? And is it my fault he ended this way?'”
But explained that part “just gets smaller and smaller, because it doesn’t serve me anymore, and where he is now, he certainly doesn’t want me to take that on.”
“So, you know, if that can help any parents who might be torturing themselves with that … I believe life is meant to be lived with as much joy as we can,” Melissa shared. “But life is also contrast. Life is also up and down.”
“I’ve lived enough of it now to know,” she added. “And you can’t lay down. You can’t be shattered. You can’t die and give up. You know, that’s what my son did. It’s to be lived. It’s to learn. I still struggle with it but that’s what I can say.”
As previously reported, in 1998, Etheridge and her ex-partner, Julie Cypher, celebrated the arrival of Beckett. The singer and Cypher also share a 23-year-old daughter, Bailey. Both were conceived via sperm donation from singer David Crosby.