Melissa Etheridge is remembering late rocker David Crosby not only for his legendary contribution to music, however for an additional legacy as properly: being a sperm donor and giving Etheridge the reward of two kids.
Etheridge took to Instagram on Friday to grieve the lack of Crosby, who handed away two days earlier on the age of 81 after a protracted battle with an unnamed sickness.
“I’m grieving the lack of my pal, and Bailey’s and Beckett’s organic father, David,” Etheridge captioned a photograph of her alongside the Byrds and Crosby, Stills & Nash co-founder. “ He gave me the reward of household. I’ll eternally be grateful to him, [his son] Django, and [his wife] Jan. His music and legacy will encourage many generations to return. A real treasure.”
The “I’m the Solely One” singer’s two elder kids, Bailey, 25, and Beckett, who died from an opioid habit on the age of 21 in 2020, had been biologically fathered by Crosby. Etheridge and Crosby didn’t know one another tremendous properly when she and her companion on the time Julie Cypher had been discussing household planning. The then-couple occurred to be vacationing in Hawaii on the similar time Crosby and his spouse had been, and issues fell into place.
“I had not labored with him. I might been on the identical stage with him, had accomplished some advantages, admired him enormously,” Etheridge mentioned on Larry King Dwell in 2000, per Individuals.
“We stopped by the place they had been staying, and we had been hacking out on the again porch, and their 8-month-old son was there and sleeping on Jan’s chest,” Cypher defined. “We had been speaking about having kids and the way we had been going to do it, and it simply got here out of Jan’s mouth. She’s the one which volunteered David. She mentioned, ‘What about David?'”
“We hadn’t been extraordinarily shut pals of Julie and Melissa’s,” Crosby informed King on the time. “However I believe by now, simply from hanging out from them, you possibly can see very clearly, in a short time who they’re, and so they’re good folks, and so they made us really feel that in a short time and really simply, and I appreciated them from the primary time I met them.”
Bailey was born in 1997 and Beckett was born in 1998, and it wasn’t till 2000 that Etheridge and Cypher, made their kids’s organic father’s identification public. Crosby authorized of the moms’ determination to take action.
“They gave an excellent motive for going public with it, and I agree with it utterly,” he informed King. “Jan and I needed to cooperate with Julie and Melissa and their needs on this. And, you realize, clearly, I’m very pleased with it.”
Earlier than speaking to Crosby, Etheridge and Cypher had thought-about different well-known pals as a sperm donor, together with Brad Pitt. However Pitt’s plans to ultimately have a household of his personal deterred the 2 from going with him.
“I regarded and I noticed how badly he needed kids and I assumed, ‘I do not need to share this with somebody who actually, badly needs kids as a result of my kids do not want one other mother or father — they’ve two,'” Etheridge defined in an interview with Australia’s Studio 10 again in 2016.
“It is one of many the explanation why David Crosby and his spouse are so excellent — as a result of they already had kids,” she mentioned. “They had been trying to do that as a present.”