‘YOU WANT TO HELP’

Melissa Etheridge: I Couldn’t Save My Son From Opioids

“You want to help your child. You want to make them all better.”

Melissa Etheridge’s son, Beckett Cypher, died of an opioid addiction three months ago—and now the singer is opening up about his struggle and her realization that she couldn’t “live his life for him.” In an interview with Rolling Stone, Etheridge says, “You want to help your child. You want to make them all better.” But, she noted, the 21-year-old was an adult. “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.”

She said she still second-guesses herself. “There will always be 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. 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 magazine.