Melissa Etheridge, 58, has opened up about the tragic loss of her only son Beckett Cypher, who sadly died in May at the age of 21. His cause of death wasn’t initially known when the Grammy-winning singer’s team broke the heartbreaking news, however Melissa revealed that her son passed away after battling an opioid addiction. She sat down with our sister site Rolling Stone for an intimate conversation via video chat, and reflected on better days. “As the mother of someone who was addicted to opioids, it’s a struggle,” she began. “You want to help your child. You want to make them all better. He was a young adult. There were things out of my control, of course.”
She added, “And 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. 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.”
The singer admitted she wonders whether she could have done anything more to help Beckett in his battle with opioids. “There will always be that that place in my heart and my soul that that has a little bit of, ‘Oh, what could what could I have done? And is it my fault he ended this way?’ and all that sort of thing. And it 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,” she told the outlet, adding, “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 went on to say “life is a contrast” and you can’t “give up” no matter what happens. “Life is also up and down. I’ve lived enough of it now to know. 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.”