Melissa Etheridge says she prepared herself for the possibility of her son Beckett’s death amid his battle with drug addiction.
Twelve weeks after her 21-year-old son’s passing, the singer said that as Beckett struggled with opioid addiction, she wanted to help him and make him “all better,” but she couldn’t.
“There were things out of my control, of course,” the 59-year-old told Rolling Stone. “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.”
On May 13, Etheridge confirmed that Beckett had died.
“Today I joined the hundreds of thousands of families who have lost loved ones to opioid addiction,” she announced on social media. “My son Beckett, who was just 21, struggled to overcome his addiction and finally succumbed to it today.”
The Grammy winner, who is also a mom to daughter Bailey, 23, and 13-year-old twins Johnnie Rose and Miller Steven, told Rolling Stone that she does feel guilt but doesn’t think her son would want her to struggle in that way.
“There will always be that that place in my heart and my soul that that has a little bit of ‘Oh, what could I have done? And is it my fault he ended this way?’ and all that sort of thing,” she said. “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.”
One thing that is getting her through the tragedy is music.
“The thing that makes life make sense has always been my music,” she said. “It gives us something to do every day to get through this time, and it’s really just saved us.”