Introduction:
Priscilla Presley is reflecting on the deep toll grief took on her late daughter Lisa Marie Presley.
In this week’s PEOPLE print cover story, the matriarch says Lisa Marie was never the same after her son Benjamin Keough’s death by suicide at age 27 in 2020. Lisa Marie shared Benjamin and daughter Riley, 36, with ex-husband Danny Keough and also had twins Finley and Harper, 16, with ex-husband Michael Lockwood.
“[Ben] was absolutely the love of her life,” says Priscilla, 80. “She didn’t want to be here anymore [after his suicide]. She wanted to be with Ben … I’d tell her, ‘Lisa, you’ve got the twins. You have to take care of the twins.’ She tried. She really did.”
Three years after Benjamin’s death, Lisa Marie died at age 54 from a small bowel obstruction, a long-term complication from bariatric surgery.
“It was the second saddest day of my life, other than losing Elvis,” Priscilla says of her late ex-husband and Lisa Marie’s dad, Elvis Presley. “It took a long time to come to terms with the fact that Lisa was gone.”
Priscilla recounts the final moments she spent with Lisa Marie in the hospital in her revelatory new memoir, Softly, as I Leave You: Life After Elvis.
“I knew from the first moment I walked into Lisa’s hospital room that she was already gone,” Priscilla writes in her book. “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.”
Priscilla says she and the family were at the hospital “all day long.”
“Lisa really wasn’t breathing, so she was on the ventilator,” she says. “For hours we were there waiting, hoping and praying until the doctor came in and said, ‘Priscilla, I’m so sorry, she’s gone.’ We just couldn’t believe it — didn’t want to believe it. It was hard on all of us, it still is. But like I said, she wanted to go. She did not want to be here. She wanted to be with Ben.”
Priscilla writes in her book that she had to make the difficult decision to take Lisa Marie off life support.
“They had restarted Lisa’s heart, but there was no guarantee it would keep beating,” she writes. “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,” she continues. “I said what I had to. ‘Take her off the machine, Doctor.’ My voice was barely above a whisper.”
Now, Priscilla chooses to remember the fun times she had with her daughter.
“I know there’s a lot out there that I did this to Lisa, I did that to Lisa,” she says. “There’s a lot of people out there who didn’t want Lisa and I to be close. We were very close. Lisa could be hard-headed but so could I sometimes. We had a lot of good times together.”
“She was fun to be with,” she continues. “She liked to have a few drinks and hang out with friends. She’d call me and say, ‘Mom, you want to come over and have a drink?’ I could be with someone already having dinner, and she’d say, ‘Well, bring them all over.’ She liked having fun for sure.”