The Truth Is ... by Melissa Etheridge

Author:Melissa Etheridge [Etheridge, Melissa with Morton, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-76564-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-07-06T04:00:00+00:00

Talking to My Angel

• • •

After Brave and Crazy, it was back out onto the road and then back into the studio to start my third album, Never Enough. Those were the years when I really had the fire inside me. To perform, to produce, to love Julie. I was so filled with a hunger and a desire to succeed and move onto the next level—I was just driven. I just wanted to go, go, go.

I was still working with Kevin and Fritz. Kevin was becoming a part of my musical growth. We actually produced Never Enough together. We were in the studio working one afternoon when I got a phone call from my parents. It was one of those phone calls that you just never want to get. My dad had just been diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer. I couldn’t handle this in our usual family way. I couldn’t just pretend this wasn’t happening.

The first phone call I made was to my manager, Bill. I was sobbing uncontrollably, and Bill did what he does best with me. He went into a protection mode. He assured me that I had his total support to do whatever I needed to do to get through this, and said that I need not worry about anything else other than taking care of my dad. Bill took care of rearranging all of my business obligations, and he made space in my schedule so that I could bring my parents out to California and get my dad the very best medical attention available. Bill was my rock throughout the whole cancer ordeal with my father. But that’s Bill. He is strong and smart and supportive and loves me completely without condition.

When my parents called, they told me that my father had anywhere from six weeks to six months to live. Knowing that L.A. had great cancer centers and, more importantly, wanting to be near my dad, I brought my mother and father out to Los Angeles to see what could be done. Waiting for them at the airport, I couldn’t help but be nervous as I remembered the last couple of times I saw my father.

Six months before, he had been to see me in Los Angeles and he didn’t have any fun. He spent most of the trip complaining about little things—things that didn’t seem important at the time but really got him down. Perhaps he felt I was spending too much time with Julie and I wasn’t paying him enough attention. I don’t know. But I do know that it was very unusual for us to bicker like that. My whole life I’d wanted to be like my dad. He was just a nice person. He was a good man who was warm and compassionate and very easygoing. He’d always been so supportive of me—in my career, in my sexuality, in allowing me to be who I needed to be—that I was disturbed by this seeming change in him, this differentness that I had never seen before.

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