Melissa Etheridge is opening up about her son’s life and death. In an interview with Good Morning America on Tuesday, the 59-year-old singer spoke about the injury that eventually led to her son, Beckett’s, death in May due to an opioid addiction. He was 21.
“He loved to snowboard and that’s where he broke his ankle and that’s what started the whole downward spiral of pain killers,” Etheridge explained. “You do everything you can, because you’re a parent, you think, ‘What could I have done? Could I have done more?'”
“There has to be a place where you think, ‘Of course I did everything I could,'” she continued. “I loved him, I loved him, I loved him. And there’s just a place where you have to start loving yourself.”
Etheridge noted that “time does heal,” as she shared the reason she felt ready to speak out now, just two months after Beckett’s death.
“It’s only been a couple of months, but I’ve been very busy and made myself busy. You go one day at a time and you get through the grief and you get to the healing,” she said. “I wanted to come back to the world and say, ‘Thank you for your thoughts and your prayers and your feelings and your sending of love to me and my family.'”
“I would like to walk this walk now of what’s next, which is helping,” she added.
Another thing that’s helping is the founding of The Etheridge Foundation, which will work to support research about addiction.
“I’m very intense about raising funds for research into what we can do with this disease that takes so many of our young people,” she said.
Etheridge is also finding healing through her music.
“There’s something about singing, there’s something about opening the soul, it’s gotten me through everything,” she said. “So many people throughout my life have said, ‘Your music got me through this. Your music got me through that.’ And I now am using my music to get me through this.”
“You go one day at a time — you get through the grief and you get to the healing.” @metheridge speaks out for the first time since her son’s tragic death and shared how music is helping her heal. https://t.co/JgSnrU8lrQpic.twitter.com/d6Dj3drDaA
— Good Morning America (@GMA) July 14, 2020
There’s also Etheridge TV, which features live concerts and chat shows as a way to connect to people amid this time of isolation.
“It’s, of course, healing for me, but [it’s] mostly to connect with my fans… We’re still isolated and it’s starting to get hard on us,” she said. “It’s one thing that really contributed to Beckett’s passing. He had nowhere to go. He couldn’t get on his skateboard and go to the skateboard park [because] they were closing those. There’s people who are still suffering and I want to give them relief.”
