With the release of Lisa Marie Presley’s posthumous memoir From Here to the Great Unknown in paperback, I thought it would be interesting to compare Lisa Marie’s with her mother Priscilla’s book Softly As I Leave You, released this year. While there’s obviously differences of perception, the contrast is sometimes quite large. Priscilla’s book would even at times appear to be direct responses to accusations made by Lisa Marie and Riley in their book.
In this installment (part one here, part two, part three, part four), we’re comparing recollections involving Lisa’s going into therapy, her final days, becoming a grandmother and her sudden death.
TRIGGER WARNING FOR TALK OF ADDICTION, DISTURBING AND FRANK SUBJECT MATTER AND DEATH.
All excerpts are from each respective book and are being used for educational purposes only. I only quote relevant portions and do not include every variation of recollection. If you want the full stories, please read the books.
Quotes from articles and other sources are used for accuracy purposes since perceptions greatly vary at this point.
Sorry for the delay if you care, real life took over- let’s begin!
Lisa:
When I started talking to a therapist, it was really nice to hear somebody talk back and say, “Hey, you’re not fucked up,” or “You need to stop shooting yourself in the foot.”
I also attended group therapy and initially I really resisted it. But eventually I started getting close to people. I realized that they were all as fucked up as me.
In a 2018 interview with Today, Lisa said she’d come a long way in her journey to sobriety, crediting her four children and her late father, Elvis Presley, for helping her get through some of her darkest times:
“I am proud. I have a therapist, and she was like, ‘You’re a miracle, you really are…I don’t know how you’re still alive.'”
Riley:
More and more she became set on helping people somehow, especially grieving parents. The act of helping was the only way she could feel any relief. She wanted to help others so she could help herself. She would have groups of parents who had also lost children over to her house on Sundays. She would put out little sandwiches, and she and her grief counselor would run grief groups. She wrote an op-ed about grief, the first time she had ever written anything like that. She was planning to do a podcast about grief as a way of finding purpose—she desperately wanted to connect with people who had this shared experience. Nothing else inspired her.
[Riley would also say on her book tour that her mother and father moved in together with the twins after their son’s death and did grief support groups which consumed their time]
Lisa Marie’s grief counselor, David Kessler, in Rolling Stone magazine:
Weeks after [Benjamin’s] passing, she was put in touch with Kessler — but insisted on grieving on her own terms. “She didn’t want someone who’d studied grief academically and would tell her what she should be doing,” he says. “She said, ‘I don’t want a therapist, I don’t need a grief counselor. If you want to be friends, I’m open to that.’ ” With his help, she began attending online sessions with other bereaved parents, who mostly didn’t recognize her, and eventually hosted some in her home. Besides her son, other family members would sometimes come up.
Priscilla:
She no longer had the release of the auditing sessions that Scientology had once provided for her. Though she had left the church, she retained some of its beliefs, including a distrust of psychologists. She was still opposed to therapy, which would have given her a potential outlet for her feelings. It was near the end of this period that she began recording the tapes that would be transposed and edited for her autobiography. It was a way for her to feel that she had a voice and to release some of the fear, anger, and despair that enveloped her.
The pain began to pour out of her onto audiotapes in a mixture of memories and nightmares, of what had happened and what she believed had happened.
Riley Becomes a Mother, and Lisa a Grandmother:
Priscilla:
“I love her babies,” says Priscilla. “I’m really happy for Riley. She’s got an amazing husband and two great children, so I’m happy for her very much.”
Asked about Tupelo, Priscilla calls her “so cute.” She says she was talking even before her first birthday.
“At my home, there’s a pond right down below, and I’m holding her, and she goes, ‘Pond,’ ” Priscilla recalls. “She’s not even a year going, ‘Pond.’ Then she looked, and she saw a car. I went to Lisa, and I said, ‘Lisa, she’s not even a year, and she’s telling me all what’s out there.’ [Riley] was saying that her husband really spends a lot of time with her. She’s a chatterbox.”
Priscilla adds that Tupelo sweetly “lives in her own world.”
“She does what she wants,” she says. “She rules.”
Riley:
Her father called her Yisa. He would replace all the l’s with y’s when he spoke to my mom.
The other night I was rocking my daughter, Tupelo, to sleep, and I found myself calling her “yitty-bitty” and singing to her, Momma’s little baby loves shortnin’, shortnin’, and I stopped and thought, I literally haven’t heard this song since I was a baby. And I realized in that moment that all of these phrases I use, and the things I say to my daughter, are the ways my mom spoke to me. She had gotten them directly from her dad. From the South. And all of them are alive in me. I can hear her saying, “Get over here, goddamn it, and give me some sugar!” She mothers my daughter through me.
[…] My mom instantly became obsessed with Tupelo—she felt she had a special connection with her, so she’d come over to my house in Silver Lake and take her away to be alone with her. I’d watch through the window as they’d go off to sit in the garden—my mom would call it her fairy garden, just as I had called our garden in Hidden Hills a fairy garden for Ben Ben when we were little. My mom bought swing sets and toys that filled her own house so that Tupelo could sleep over.
[…] She looked at Tupelo and the first thing she said was, “Ben Ben brought me to you.”
When we came home from the hospital, my mom and dad would do the eight p.m. to one a.m. shift together so Ben and I could get some sleep.
They were a few brief months of joy, filled with the new little blessing in our lives. My mom would call Tupelo “our little light,” would look in her eyes and say, “Bless her sweet little feisty heart. She’s like a fairy-tale creature—a little fawn.”
[…] my mom and I snuck off to a spot next to the nonsmoking hotel restaurant, and giggling like teenagers hiding from their parents, we lit up. I had quit smoking years ago, but I wanted to have this cigarette with my mom. Eventually my dad came around the corner and lit a cigarette, too.
[…] As we smoked, my mother said, “Ugh, that baby—I can’t handle her! She fills me up and knocks me dead.”
“I know, sweet Sawny,” my dad said. (My mom’s word “fawn” had become Sawn had become Sawny in our silly shared language.)
There, in that moment, I found myself feeling so grateful that I still had both my parents. I didn’t take it for granted
Lisa Marie’s Deteriorating Health After Benjamin’s Suicide
Priscilla:
Our family was still awash in grief and sorrow. Benjamin’s loss remained raw, and Lisa had withdrawn into a very dark place. Michael was afraid she would relapse under the strain of Ben’s passing. He worried about the effect the trauma was having on the twins. He also wondered how keeping Ben’s body at home had affected them. Lisa, meanwhile, was holding on to the girls for dear life. Her daughters were her only reason for living.
Riley:
Though she was fighting to keep it together for my sisters, my mom’s health was deteriorating—she had started to say that her stomach was always bothering her. She would have spells of fevers. She was trying to stay inspired and hold on to hope, but underneath everything, there seemed to be a heartbreak that was only growing. And despite my constant scheduling of appointments, she would never see a doctor.
In 2022 she got an infection and later had to have her uterus removed. It was incredibly hard for her.
“It held all my babies,” she said.
One day in October that year, we all went to Disneyland. As we were about to get on a ride she sat down on some stairs and said she didn’t feel well, that she was really nauseated. Again, I urged her to go to the doctor, and again, I got no response.
On top of her feeling unwell at Disneyland, there was a strange energy at the end of 2022. Unusual things kept happening with her health.
Things started cascading. She would constantly complain about her stomach, about feeling nauseated. She would drink lots of Pepto-Bismol, which was always by her bed. I could tell my sisters were worried, too—they’d often ask me, “Is Mama going to be okay?” I would say yes, but I didn’t believe it. I think maybe my sisters knew, too.
David Kessler:
According to Kessler, she had also complained about stomach pain in the weeks before her death.
Jerry Schilling, Elvis Presley’s best friend:
[…] [Lisa Marie] and Schilling flew to Memphis for an advanced screening of Elvis. Schilling thinks he hadn’t seen her since Ben’s funeral, two years before. “At the airport, she said to me, ‘I’m not the same and I never will be,’ ” Schilling says. “You could see the stress she’d been through. But she was trying her best.”
Priscilla:
Among other things, [the Elvis film] had been good for our relationship. She had been resentful toward me since the custody dispute. I understood that her anger made perfect sense to her and that there was nothing I could do about it.
I was a little worried about her as well. When we had talked over the last couple of months, she would sometimes mention that she had pain in her stomach. She said she didn’t know why. What she wasn’t telling me, perhaps because she didn’t recognize its relevance, was that she’d had a gastric bypass a couple of years before. I wasn’t sure when.
At the time of the bypass, she had just told me she was having “a little cosmetic surgery.” Because she did have these procedures now and then, I hadn’t thought much about it this time. But Lisa wasn’t one to complain to me about physical ailments, so it rang a warning bell when she mentioned recurrent pain. I told her she needed to see a doctor, and she promised she would. Of course, she didn’t, and I eventually learned she was also ignoring Riley’s suggestions that she see a physician.
Her failure to follow through was frustrating and worrisome, but Lisa wasn’t a child anymore. When she was six, I could simply put her in the car and take her to the doctor. It doesn’t work that way when your child is fifty-four. It hadn’t worked with her father, either.
Lisa Marie’s Final Days
Riley:
At the time I was working in Canada, so I suggested we all head to Whistler in British Columbia [for Christmas]. She loved that idea. For the next month I would send her photos of hotels and things to do there. She was really excited about it.
I booked everything for her—flights, hotels, things to do—the bill was astronomical. But she just said, “So what? You never know when it’s your last Christmas together.”
As the trip approached, all that was left was for her to get her passport renewed. Then, disaster—despite our best efforts, the passport didn’t arrive in time.
As silly as it may seem, not getting to Whistler represented so much to my mother. She was desperate for a magical escape, and Whistler had come to represent an ideal, a dreamland. When it fell through, I swear something changed. She seemed resigned to something, as though she wasn’t going to find the joy she once felt here anymore.
David Kessler:
Wearing a floral-pattern coat to ward off the middle-of-night chill, Presley beckoned Kessler into one of the golf carts she would regularly use to navigate Graceland’s 14 acres. As her friend held on, she hit the pedal and began whipping around the paved roads that snaked through the property — so fast that Kessler, who was accustomed to golf carts that puttered along, asked if there were seat belts. “No seat belts!” Kessler remembers her barking back.
[…] Finally, they arrived at their destination: the Meditation Garden, the patch of ground behind Graceland that includes a circular fountain and, most prominently, the graves of Elvis, his parents, and Ben […] “I’ll be right there next to him someday,” she said, according to Kessler, motioning to the empty space next to where Ben had been laid to rest.
Not for a long time, Kessler replied.
“No, no — it’s going to be a long time,” she told him. “I really want to do things. I have a lot more to do.”
[…] After more than two years of seclusion, Presley was ready to reengage with the public.
Riley:
[…] we had dinner in L.A. together on January 8—coincidentally her father’s birthday—just she and I, my husband, and my girlfriends, which was common. She was unusually quiet, withdrawn, in her own world. I kept trying to include her in the conversations, but she looked at me and said, “I’m going to go home.”
There was a sadness to her, and the same sense of resignation. I was worried.
My husband and I walked her to her car. She seemed very soft, almost empty, and my mom was not a soft person.
Something had left her.
Jerry Schilling:
[Lisa] asked Schilling if he would accompany her two nights later on the red carpet at the Golden Globes, where Elvis was up for several awards. She told Schilling she would be coming alone, so he should keep an eye out for her.
[…] What the public (including those who reached out to [friend Linda] Ramone after) saw was a woman who looked startlingly pale and seemed to have trouble walking, clinging to Schilling […] Schilling attributes her careful steps to her footwear. As soon as she arrived, he says, “She had these huge high heels and said, ‘Oh, man, I think I’ve made a mistake with these shoes. I’m going to hold on to you, because these shoes are killer.’ ” Schilling insists the evening was “really uneventful,” adding, “Lisa was as lucid as anybody there. Anybody who says different doesn’t know what they’re talking about.” After the Globes, Presley attended a Luhrmann-thrown bash at the Chateau Marmont, staying until about midnight.
Priscilla:
Before she left for Graceland, Lisa had called to see if I wanted to go to the Golden Globe Awards with her. We were both invited, and she wanted us to go together […] Lisa and I were excited about the film’s nominations.
Something was off with Lisa’s behavior that night, too. She seemed a little out of it, and her speech was slightly slurred as if she’d been drinking. At the time, I thought she might be under the influence, but in retrospect, I’m not so sure […] Shortly after Austin’s speech, Lisa leaned into me and whispered, “Mom, I need to go. My stomach hurts.” […] But despite her pain, Lisa wasn’t quite ready to let go of the magical evening. She told me, “Let’s stop at Chateau Marmont for a drink on the way home.” I said okay, and we agreed to meet there.
[…] By the time we met at the hotel restaurant, though, Lisa had changed her mind. She was very pale and said, “Mom, my stomach really hurts. I need to go home.”
“Of course, sweetheart. We’ll get the car.”
When the car was brought up, I supported her over to where the valet was holding the car door open. I gave her a hug and said, “Let me know when you get home.”
I didn’t know it was the last hug. When she called to say she was safely home, I would have stayed on the line if I’d known it was the last time I’d hear her voice.
Sources told The Post:
The friend added that mother and daughter did not even want to sit close to each other at the Golden Globes last month to celebrate the nominated movie “Elvis,” saying: “Lisa didn’t want to have anything to do with her mom. She was basically estranged from Priscilla for the last seven to eight years. They only talked when there was no option.
Lisa:
When I tell people my stories, they tell me I’m strong. But that makes me crazy because I think, What’s it for, though? Throw stuff at me and I’ll get through it, but for what? What does the strength matter? It doesn’t matter to me.
I’m not strong. I am not.
But I am still here. I didn’t lose my mind, even though I wanted to. And I could have.
I didn’t relapse or die. Or kill myself, which are three things I thought about all day long for the first eight or nine months after Ben Ben died. I’ve been vacillating between all three.
But I didn’t.
I have two little girls that I have to be a mother to. I keep my focus on that. My son was concerned about his sisters. It was his main objective. The few last-moment texts he fired off said to watch and protect his sisters. They don’t know this. I won’t let them know until they’re older.
I know Ben Ben would be infuriated with me if I died and joined him.
He would be mad at me in hell or heaven, wherever we’re going.
Lisa Marie’s Sudden Death
Priscilla:
Two days later, on the morning of January 12, my phone rang early in the day. It was Danny.
Danny said, “Nona, Lisa’s unwell. You need to come.”
Swallowing my panic, I asked Danny what had happened. He had gotten up early that morning and come downstairs to find Lisa on the floor. She was unresponsive. He couldn’t feel a pulse. He called 911 and did CPR, then sat on the floor, holding her in his arms, until the paramedics arrived.
While the medical staff put Lisa in a room in ICU, Danny called Riley and me. Riley was out of town, working, but she told her dad she’d be on the next plane. Then he called Michael to bring the twins.
I went into emergency mode. Soldier mode, as my stepfather would have seen it. I didn’t have the luxury of falling apart. I called my cousin Ivy at work and told her what was going on. Vikki said she’d pick Ivy up and bring her back while I called Navarone.
When Ivy got to my house, we left for the hospital in Woodland Hills, breaking a few speed limits on the way. There were already two paparazzi hiding on the hill when we arrived at the back entrance, waiting for me.
[Note: In Priscilla’s lawsuit against her former business partners, her former colleague said Navarone was not only indifferent to Lisa Marie dying, but refused to come to the hospital]
Rolling Stone magazine:
The next day, Jan. 12, paramedics rushed to a rented home in Calabasas, complete with a view of the mountains, to attend to a woman in “full cardiac arrest.” A housekeeper had found Presley in her bedroom. Danny Keough, who remained close to his ex-wife, even serving as best man to her wedding to Lockwood, had moved into the house to help her after the death of their son, Ben. He administered CPR, as did the paramedics, who initially detected signs of life. Presley was taken to West Hills Hospital, where she again went into cardiac arrest and was pronounced dead hours later.
Riley:
A couple days later, I went back to Vancouver where I was filming a show. I found myself checking in via text more than usual, but she was less responsive than she normally was. My worry deepened.
On the morning of January 12, my mom texted my dad [who was taking the twins to school] and said, “Can you please help? My stomach’s hurting worse than ever. Can you bring Tums?”
I’d been having a beautiful morning with the baby. I had texted my mom the day before and she hadn’t responded, which was really unlike her. When my dad called, I knew something bad had happened.
“It’s your mom,” he said, “and it’s not looking good.”
My heart stopped.
By the time he had gotten to her with the Tums she’d asked for, the housekeeper had found her on the floor.
“They think she’s had a heart attack,” he said. “She’s in an ambulance now. They’re trying to resuscitate her.”
I went right to the airport and got the first flight I could back to L.A. For the whole car ride, and then while I was in the air, my dad and my husband were texting me.
“They’re at the hospital now…. She’s still alive…. They’ve resuscitated her…. She has a pulse now…. They’re doing a scan to see what happened….”
Priscilla:
I knew from the first moment I walked into Lisa’s hospital room that she was already gone. She was hooked to a machine that was breathing for her, and she had a heartbeat. There was little brain activity. Her spirit, always so vital, wasn’t there.
Riley later told us that while she was still on her flight, she had felt her mother’s spirit pass. But none of us was ready to give up yet.
A nurse came to tell me that Navarone had arrived. I asked her to bring him into the room. Then we began to wait. Finally, Navarone voiced the question we were all thinking. How long until we knew if she was going to start breathing again? The doctor said it could be two minutes. Or it could be two days. After two hours, Navarone couldn’t take the anxiety any longer. He left to go into the other room. The others were allowed in one or two at a time.
Danny and I remained, holding Lisa’s hands, stroking her face, telling her we loved her.
Riley:
On the airplane home, I felt like my mother was between two worlds, being resuscitated, falling, resuscitated, falling. I wanted so badly to be there with her—spiritually at least—and tell her that I supported whatever she wanted to do. I closed my eyes and talked to her spirit. “If you need to go, go. If you need to stay, stay.”
Priscilla:
[…] but then we heard an emergency alarm from Lisa’s room. It was a code blue; Lisa’s heart had stopped.
As I started back to my daughter, the nurse detained Ivy and spoke to her in a whisper. Nodding toward me, she told Ivy, “Come with us. I need you to stand right behind her. She’s going to fall, and you will need to catch her.”
The next thing I remember is the doctor talking to me. He asked me what I wanted him to do. They had restarted Lisa’s heart, but there was no guarantee it would keep beating. I asked the doctor, “What kind of life will she have if we keep her on that machine?”
He looked at me with compassion and shook his head. “No quality of life at all.”
I thought about my girl, my wild, rebellious, passionate girl, lying in a vegetative state for the rest of her life. I said what I had to.
“Take her off the machine, Doctor.” My voice was barely above a whisper. The nurse began to unhook the apparatus that kept Lisa’s chest rising and falling.
I looked at Danny and said, “We have to tell them, Danny. So they can say goodbye.”
But as I began to move toward the door, I heard Danny’s anguished cry. “No, Nona! Don’t go! We can’t leave her all alone!”
It was unbearable. I began to sob. I don’t remember falling. I know that Ivy caught me. After that, everything went dark. I can’t remember.
I don’t want to remember.
Riley:
We were somewhere due west of Death Valley when the texts from my dad stopped. I couldn’t bear the silence for very long. I texted him, but I already knew.
It was 5:18 p.m. when my father texted, “She’s in cardiac arrest again.”
Oh God.
At 5:19 he wrote, “Can you call me?”
“No, I’m on the plane,” I wrote.
At 5:20 I wrote, “Is she dying?”
My dad didn’t respond for four minutes.
I wrote again: “Did she die?”
I waited. Then his reply arrived.
“She passed on a few minutes ago, honey. Didn’t want to tell you by text. But I’m worried it’s going to hit the papers. I love you so much. I’m really sorry to tell you like this. I don’t want you to be blindsided when you get off the plane.”
My father was my mom’s biggest protector throughout her whole adult life. She had many friends that came and went, but he was there from when she was seventeen until the moment she died. He was the last person with her.
Priscilla:
When they took me out through the back entrance of the hospital later, more paparazzi were on the hill, their telephoto lenses aimed at my face. When Danny left a little while afterward, a helicopter followed him. They had already noted his license plate. The helicopter followed him to my house.
Everyone gathered at my home. Riley and her husband arrived. We were scattered throughout the rooms in small groups, crying quietly, seeking comfort. A little later, my Beaulieu family arrived, Michelle and my brothers. Somebody arranged for food. Probably Vikki. I don’t remember.
At home, I concentrated on keeping the family— and myself—together. Part of the legacy of growing up in a military family is learning young to control your emotions in emergencies. When you start to fall apart, you remind yourself to pull yourself together. The British call it keeping a stiff upper lip. Years of being in the public eye had taught me the same lesson.
I am naturally a private person, and I find it painful to expose my intimate feelings publicly. I also have a strong sense of responsibility, and as the matriarch of the family, it was up to me to provide support and leadership in the wake of Lisa’s passing. I had three granddaughters who had lost their mother. Their needs came first.
Riley stated in a letter to Priscilla during their estate battle that hours after her mother death, she began to receive calls from Priscilla’s lawyers about the estate:
It is really hurtful that after years of me trying to resolve your and my mother’s broken relationship and restore our family, you are taking me, of all people to court.
[…] I must also share with you that I found being called about the will, less than 24 hours after my mother passed and getting emails from lawyers before my mother was even buried incredibly heartbreaking. It was very upsetting that I was forced to find a lawyer to represent me and my sisters and my mother’s wishes within days of her passing.
Riley:
We were still half an hour from L.A. Tupelo had finally calmed enough to sleep a little bit, and I quietly sobbed, trying not to disturb the passengers around me.
The world I’d taken off from in Canada that morning was not the same one I landed in at LAX that night. I didn’t recognize this strange new planet. It was already a place that, for two and a half years, had been so painfully empty of my brother, Ben Ben, and now it was empty of my mother, too.
I wondered how many times a heart can break.
[…] Time did its stretching and contracting thing again. Here we are again, I thought. I know this.
When my brother died, I was hit with the realization that he was nowhere to be found on Earth. I could travel anywhere and never find him. No matter how far I flew, how far I drove, how far I walked, he was gone. I remember driving through Northern California and passing an immense expanse of empty farmland, and thinking that he wasn’t in there, either. He could never be found, no matter how hard I looked.
Now, it was the same feeling with my mother.
Priscilla:
The doctors eventually determined that Lisa had died of a small-bowel obstruction, a result of her bariatric surgery. The dangerous complication ultimately stopped her heart. But Riley and I knew that Lisa’s heart had really stopped beating the day Benjamin died.
I like to believe that her son and her father were there to see her over.
I need to believe that my girl is not alone.
Riley to Vanity Fair:
“When my mom passed, there was a lot of chaos in every aspect of our lives. Everything felt like the carpet had been ripped out and the floor had melted from under us. Everyone was in a bit of a panic to understand how we move forward.
[…] I have been through a great deal of pain and I’ve had my.… Parts of me have died and I’ve felt like my heart has exploded, but I also feel.… I’m trying to think of how to phrase this.… I have strengthened the qualities that have come about through adversity.”
[…] “I think I’ve certainly been chosen for some wonderful things and chosen for some horrible things too,” she said. “I am aware that I have been through a lot of very crazy things, but I don’t feel like a victim. I don’t feel like poor Riley.”
Priscilla to People magazine:
“It was the second saddest day of my life, other than losing Elvis. It took a long time to come to terms with the fact that Lisa was gone.”
Lisa’s Funeral
Riley:
The next day we held the service at Graceland. All of her friends, everyone who ever loved her, attended, including people she hadn’t seen in years, everyone she had jettisoned before she fled to England, just everyone. A choir of her friends sang. What began as an incredibly traumatic and painful morning ended in a celebratory dance party, just like the ones we used to have back in the day—the same people, the same songs.
There was joy.
We all felt she was there.
Priscilla:
A private service was planned for January 21, the night before the public funeral. In addition to the family, close friends would be attending.
Guests had to sign a confidentiality agreement that they would not take any pictures, record anything, or publicly disclose any details of the evening. It was a viewing, and our fear was that someone would take and leak a photo of Lisa Marie in her casket.
The service was held at the Chapel in the Woods, usually referred to simply as the Graceland Chapel […] Ivy recognized something that I didn’t. I felt contained and in control, as I had been much of the time at the hospital when Lisa passed. As I had been right before I collapsed. My cousin saw how pale I was, saw the pain behind my eyes, and she knew what it could mean. She was my loving shadow all evening, poised to catch me if I fell again.
Riley:
The service ended and night fell. My mom’s casket was laid across a golf cart, just like the one her father had given her decades ago, the one that had given her her first taste of freedom. All of her closest friends and loved ones followed the golf cart and walked my mother from the chapel to the Meditation Garden in the backyard of Graceland.
We laid her to rest next to my brother, across from her father.
Priscilla:
The family had agreed on the manner of Lisa’s final journey. Her coffin was carried out and placed carefully on one of her beloved golf carts for transport.
With the pallbearers walking on each side of the cart, we followed her out of the woods and down the main driveway of Graceland, coming to a stop near the Meditation Garden. It was there that everyone said their farewells to Lisa and returned to the hotel to sleep before the public memorial the next morning.
Only Riley and I stayed behind, keeping Lisa company, watching the workmen ready her sarcophagus. It was identical to Benjamin’s […] Late in the night, Lisa’s coffin was placed next to his. My sweet Riley was with me as we said our final goodbye.
Riley:
I couldn’t speak, so my husband read my eulogy, “A Letter to My Mama”:
[…] I remember you driving me in my car seat, listening to Aretha Franklin. I remember the way you’d cuddle me when I’d come to your bed at night, and the way you smelled […] I remember you singing me and my brother lullabies at night, and how you’d lay with us until we fell asleep. I remember how, every time you’d leave town, you’d bring me a new tea set from Cracker Barrel.
I remember all the notes you’d leave in my lunch box every day. I remember the feeling I’d get when I’d see you picking me up from school, and the way your hand felt on my forehead […] I remember how safe it felt to be in your arms. I remember that feeling as a child and I remember it two weeks ago on your couch.
Thank you for showing me that love is the only thing that matters in this life. I hope I can love my daughter the way you loved me, and the way you loved my brother and my sisters.
Thank you for giving me strength, my heart, my empathy, my courage, my sense of humor, my manners, my temper, my wildness, my tenacity. I am a product of your heart. My sisters are a product of your heart. My brother is a product of your heart. We are you, you are us, my eternal love. I hope you finally know how loved you were here. Thank you for trying so hard for us. If I didn’t tell you every day, thank you.
Priscilla:
I was the next person to speak. I held myself upright and slowly climbed the stairs. It was lonely walking across that stage. When I reached the microphone, I told the audience, “I am going to read something written by my granddaughter. That says it all.” I struggled to raise my voice above a whisper as I read the words written by my fifteen-year-old Harper:
“Mama was my icon, my role model and my super hero…. She was born into our world, born strong but was delicate, filled with life…. She always knew she wouldn’t be here long…. She lost her second child… a broken heart was the doing of her death. My heart is missing her love. She knew that I loved her. The old soul is always with me.”
Afterward, Riley’s husband, Ben, mounted the stage to read a letter on Riley’s behalf, as he had at Benjamin’s funeral. He looked as though he had the weight of the world on his shoulders as he looked down at the words his wife had written.
I was proud of Ben. He choked back his tears and read each word his wife needed to tell her mother that day. And he reminded us all of the future when he read Riley’s words about their daughter, my first great-grandchild, named Tupelo Storm, in honor of her great-grandfather and uncle.
Rolling Stone magazine:
On the same day as her service, on the other side of the Atlantic, Ed Harcourt’s son grabbed a comic book in their London home. Harcourt sometimes would stash work papers in books, and in this case, out fell a handwritten lyric to a song he and Presley had written together but hadn’t included on Storm & Grace. It was called “Light of Day,” and in perfectly handwritten prose with no cross-outs, it read, in part, “There’s a gift that you’ve been given/There’s a role you need to play/There’s a light to be taken/Now let it be the light of day.”
Afterward
Priscilla:
How do you explain the loss of your child to others? How do you explain it to yourself? Every morning, I wake up and realize that a big part of me is gone forever. Lisa lived inside me for nine months. I gave birth to her. I held her, and I nursed her. For so many years, she was my first thought in the morning and my last thought at night.
[…] I remember so many things. I remember cradling her tiny body in my arms for the first time. I remember gazing with wonder at her beautiful little face […] I remember her having a tantrum one minute, then crawling into my arms a few minutes later, saying, “I’m sorry, Mommy.”
So much like her father.
And I remember the bedtimes when I would read her a story or play her a song, then say the Lord’s Prayer with her before kissing her and saying, “Sleep well, my love.”
I remember her sleeping face on the pillow, angelic after a day of making mischief. And I remember the woman she grew up to be. I remember my twentysomething daughter digging through the Easter basket I gave her, then hiding the eggs for two-year-old Riley to find over and over again. I remember her stroking baby Navarone’s blond curls. I remember how excited she still got over Christmas presents. I remember going to her concerts and feeling so proud of her, I thought I might burst. I remember her calling me for no particular reason, just to say hi. I remember her radiance on the day she married Danny in that small office in the Scientology Celebrity Centre. I remember the late-night calls when she was struggling in her marriage. I remember walking along the sand in Hawaii in the moonlight, holding her hand as she shared her confusion over Michael Jackson. I remember listening to her vent her frustration that two people who loved each other as much as she and Nick did couldn’t go a day without fighting. I remember the tenderness beneath the public persona of “Lisa Marie F*** ing Presley.”
[…] Though I have suffered deep losses, I choose to focus on what remains. It gets me through the bad days. I lost my mother, but I carry on her spirit and her traditions. I lost my daughter, but I still have a son who loves me deeply. I lost my grandson, but I have three remarkable, loving granddaughters who give my life meaning. I have my sister and brothers and cousin. We have weathered the struggles that all families have and remained intact. And we have weathered the drama created by the press that could have divided us. On holidays and birthdays and at times when we’re all in town, we sit down at the table together to eat, to laugh, to talk, and to share memories.
[…] Benjamin’s departure was not gentle; it was so wrenching that it almost destroyed our family and led directly to the biggest loss of all—my daughter’s life. You cannot leave without leaving someone else behind to grieve. I live with grief, and I have learned that it never goes away. I will never outlive it, but I move through it one day at a time. I carry every one of the people I have lost with me. I feel their presence, and I believe that my journey will eventually bring us back to one another.
[…] Lisa liked to write letters. She wrote me letters for much of her life. I keep them in a scrapbook on my coffee table and read them on the bad days. On the days her absence is a physical ache, on the days I wish I’d listened to her more or been the perfect mother I tried so hard to be. I read them, and I hear her voice reassure me again:
Mommy,
This is supposed to be a card of thanks, happiness, care, loyalty, and love most of all for being my mom. There’s been lies and there’s been upsets, which neither of them you deserve, and what you do deserve is the best and that only. No kid in the world has or will have a mom like you. Someone who cares and someone who will understand as much as you do. And I know that now I have so many dreams I’d like to live. But we will both help each other live them.
And from here on out, I’m gonna take care of you! And protect you! Because you’re just not gonna get hurt anymore by anyone, especially me. I love you, Mommy.
You are the most important person in my life, and forever will you be that.
L
My little wild child, I love you forever.
Riley:
About a week before this book was first published, I was at home with my husband and daughter […] We got Tupelo to bed, Ben went off to do some things around the house, and I felt compelled to go to my bedroom, though I wasn’t tired. I put my phone away and lay on top of the bed for a few minutes before realizing that I had come here to listen for something, to look for anything, a sign of my mother. Something you’re always afraid to look for in the event that it’s not there. I closed my eyes and tried to find her, thinking back to when I had lain right here listening to her tapes for the first time, but saw nothing, heard nothing.
The room was empty. I was here, alone.
“I hope this is how you wanted this all to happen,” I said to her, to nobody.
Only a deep silence.
And then, suddenly, she was everywhere.
She was on magazine covers and TV shows. She was all over social media. Clips of my mother’s disembodied voice were playing as podcast teasers. I took Oprah around Graceland and showed her my mother’s favorite places to get in trouble
[…] The whole time, all I could think about was what she would have wanted. I knew, above all else, that she would have wanted the book to be authentic. After that, she would have wanted to feel like people really knew her, to finally be in control of her story. She would have wanted people to understand her grief, pain, joy, everything.
Everywhere I went, I looked for a sign of her telling me that she was happy with my choice to complete the book. Or that she was around at all […] But in this moment, I had to come to the stark realization that she had truly missed it all.
[…] I went back home and tried to process what had just happened. I talked to my father about how he felt about the book, its publication. We agreed that even though she hadn’t been able to finish the book, she still felt like a far more complete picture than she had before.
I heard from people who had read the book and felt compelled to write and tell me how they felt. Many of the letters and responses brought me to tears because they were so touching, but also because they were exactly the reaction that I know my mother had wanted to elicit. If she could make just one person feel less alone, less imprisoned in grief or depression, that would have been enough for her. She told me that. As I read through the reactions, I tried to imagine her reading them over my shoulder, as the world for once embraced her lovingly, in all of her glory and pain and defects and triumphs.
[…] When I was younger, my mom would always tell me I’m going to make a documentary about her one day. Was the book always meant to go this way? Was everything? Had I entered this life to document hers? Without any word from her, I felt like I was starting to spin out.
I like to imagine that people who have passed away still get the opportunity to watch their loved one’s lives unfold. Not because I’ve seen any proof of it, just because I like the idea. But what if she doesn’t see anything. What if when people die, they’re just gone?
What if a sign from her never came?
These were the ever-loudening thoughts swirling in my head when our second child was born two weeks early, on February 1.
My mother’s birthday.
Sources: From Here to the Great Unknown – Lisa Marie Presley & Riley Keough (2024), Softly As I Leave You – Priscilla Presley (2025), Priscilla details removing Lisa Marie from life support, Riley talks to Vanity Fair, Riley’s letter to Priscilla, Inside Priscilla Presley and Riley Keough’s Fight Over Lisa Marie’s Trust, The Haunted Life of Lisa Marie Presley, Riley Keough and Husband Ben Smith-Petersen Quietly Welcomed Baby No. 2 Earlier This Year, Instagram: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, YouTube
