In a new interview with RollingStone magazine, rock star Melissa Etheridge is opening up about her 21-year-old son’s death. As Mamas Uncut previously reported, on May 13, Etheridge’s son, Beckett Cypher, was found dead in Denver.
The young man reportedly had an opioid addiction at the time of his passing. Shortly after the news of his passing was made public, Etheridge took to Instagram to share a brief statement.
Melissa Etheridge Opens Up About Son’s Death In Interview With RollingStone
Part of her statement read, “Today I joined the hundreds of thousands of families who have lost loved ones to opioid addictions. My son Beckett, who was just 21, struggled to overcome his addictions and finally succumbed to it today. He will be missed by those who loved him, his family and friends. My heart is broken.”
Now, as she spoke with Rolling Stone, the mom is sharing more details about Beckett’s battle with addiction and his subsequent death. As she admitted, she’s still learning how to cope with the death of her son.
“As the mother of someone who was addicted to opioids, it’s a struggle. 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,” Etheridge explained.
Sadly, as Beckett got older, Etheridge continued to lose more and more control over how he lived his life. “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.”
Nonetheless, despite having that conversation with herself, Etheridge admits she still wonders if there was more she could have done. “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.”
And although Etheridge is now left wondering what more she could have done for Beckett, she does confess that that feeling as been getting smaller and smaller. She hopes that is comforting to other parents going through something similar.
“It doesn’t serve me anymore, and where he is now, he certainly doesn’t want me to take that on. 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. But life is also contrast. 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.”
Ethridge told RollingStone she found music to be what has helped her most during this healing process. The musician said music has always been “the thing that makes life make sense.”