In memoriam. Melissa Etheridge opened up about her 21-year-old son Beckett’s death two months after his overdose.
“Time does heal. It’s only been a couple of months, but I’ve been very busy and made myself very busy,” the Grammy winner, 59, said during a Tuesday, July 14, Good Morning America appearance. “You go one day at a time. You get through the grief and you get to the healing.”
Singing has helped the “Come to My Window” crooner get “through everything,” she went on to tell Robin Roberts. “There’s something about singing, something about opening the soul. So many people throughout my life 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.”
In May, the Oscar winner confirmed her son’s death via Twitter. “Today, I joined the hundreds of thousands of families who have lost loved ones to opioid addiction,” Etheridge tweeted at the time. “My son Beckett, who was just 21, struggled to overcome his addiction and finally succumbed to it today. He will be missed by those who loved him, his family and friends.”
She went on to write, “My heart is broken. We struggle with what else we could have done to save him and in the end, we know he is out of pain now. I will sing again, soon. It has always healed me.”
The Kansas native “can’t help to feel responsible” for Beckett’s death because she first introduced him to painkillers after a snowboarding accident, she told Roberts, also 59, on Tuesday. “He made these choices and he was a young adult. I couldn’t save him — only he could save him. … He felt very intensely about everything, and you know, in the last few months, he became someone I didn’t know. The drugs turn you into that.”
Etheridge reflected on her son’s “incredible sense of humor,” noting that he was “also very sensitive to people, to life, to the injustice of life.”
