Lisa Marie Presley passed away at the age of 54 in January 2023 due to complications from a small bowel obstruction that developed after bariatric surgery years ago.
However, her daughter, Riley Keough, believes that it wasn’t just the surgery complications that ultimately took her mother’s life. In an interview with PEOPLE, the Daisy Jones & the Six actress opened up about how the hardships that followed after Lisa Marie lost her son, Benjamin, also contributed to her mother’s passing.
Lisa Marie Presley was a mother of four, with three daughters, Riley, Harper, and Finley, and a son, Benjamin Keough, who tragically died by suicide on July 12, 2020, at the age of 27.
According to Riley Keough, it was very apparent that her mother “died from a broken heart.”
“My mom tried her best to find strength for me and my younger sisters after Ben died, but we knew how much pain she was in,” she said. “My mom physically died from the after-effects of her surgery, but we all knew she died of a broken heart.”
Lisa Marie was very open about how much heartache she faced after Benjamin’s passing. In fact, her last Instagram post before her death was an essay she wrote about the ongoing grief she still struggled with.
Read a blurb of the essay below.
“One is that grief does not stop or go away in any sense, a year, or years after the loss…Two, grief is incredibly lonely…Three, and particularly if the loss was premature, unnatural, or tragic, you will become a pariah in a sense. You can feel stigmatized and perhaps judged in some way as to why the tragic loss took place. This becomes magnetized by a million if you are the parent of a child who passed. No matter how old they were. No matter the circumstances.”
Lisa Marie Presley’s life story is set to be told in an upcoming memoir.
Before her death, Lisa Marie Presley had been working on a memoir, documenting many of her untold life stories and experiences. After she passed, Riley Keough stepped in to help complete the book, spending hours listening to tapes her mother had recorded to make sure her story would be fully told.
Revealed by PEOPLE, a portion of the unreleased memoir delves into Lisa Marie’s life as she navigated the loss of her son. The outlet reports that she and Riley found healing “by helping people.”
A passage from Lisa Marie’s memoir shared by PEOPLE reads:
“One kid wrote to Riley and said, ‘I didn’t kill myself last night because of what you said it would do to my family and those that are left behind. So thank you.’ That helped me. That brought me up.”
Lisa Marie Presley’s memoir, titled From Here to the Great Unknown, will be available on October 8.
Riley Keough is set to discuss her mother’s book in more depth during an interview with Oprah Winfrey, which was filmed at Graceland and scheduled to air on the book’s release date.