In her new docuseries Melissa Etheridge: I'm Not Broken, Melissa Etheridge discusses holding a concert in a women's prison and her son's heartbreaking death.
Her son Beckett passed away in 2020 due to an opioid addiction. For years, Etheridge wanted to hold a concert at a prison, but she never got around to it. When her son passed away, it gave her even more motivation to do the show.
"I do realize that it is unusual for a mother who lost a son not to fall apart and lose themselves in the loss," she aid in the documentary. "It serves no one. You can't get sick enough to make a sick person well...I'm not here to wear any sort of badge of shame or take anything on other than, 'Man, I'm walking this path, and I'm doing the best I can.'"
She said that after losing her son she found the right motivation to make the concert happen, according to Daily Beast.
She said, "Well, in the years that I was asked if I just wanted to do a concert, many things happened. One, I lost my son and became much more knowledgeable, having first-hand experience with addiction and trauma and what that can lead to. It really felt right: Find the synergy. Find the common ground with all of us. Just humanize this. I thought, maybe this is an opportunity to start a conversation about how we punish people and what we think of crime and punishment."
Melissa Etheridge Found Healing
She said that she found healing while on stage. It was therapeutic for Etheridge.
She said, "It was always something that was there. The producers, they were very sweet with me. The very last time they filmed me, they said, 'OK, you need to talk about Beckett.' I was like, 'All right, I'll do it.' It was a learning experience for me, and it was healing for me. What else was healing was when I was standing on stage during the concert and told the audience about my son. To see almost every woman in the audience hold their hands in the shape of a heart above their heads, having empathy for me."
She continued, "Well, it's therapeutic. It's also my attempt to put it out there and then put it aside. I don't want to linger on it. I don't want to bring it up over and over and feel the sadness. But I do believe in how it can help not only me, but others. So this was a way to do it without just "talking" about it."
