From Here to the Great Unknown

by Lisa Marie Presley

I’ve come to understand that her burning desire to tell her story was born of a need to both understand herself and be understood by others in full, for the first time in her life.

My mom fundamentally felt she was broken, unlovable, not beautiful. There was a profound sense of unworthiness in her, and I could never really figure out why. I’ve spent my whole life trying to work out the answer. My mother was an incredibly complicated person and deeply misunderstood.

When you come up from poverty, your responsibility is to bring everybody with you, and that’s what he did.

He was very gregarious in that way: He didn’t do it to have an entourage follow him. He was generous because he wanted everyone else to enjoy everything.

You could always sense my dad’s intensity. If it was a good intensity, it was incredible; if it was bad, watch the fuck out. Step back.

Whenever I told my dad I was scared he was going to die, he’d say, “I’m not going anywhere, I’m not going anywhere.” But he did.

I felt like I was her trophy. She wanted a cotillion for me. I didn’t even know what that was, but she always wanted one. She wanted me to go to finishing school. I felt like she should have gotten a different daughter. It was about how things looked—the way things appeared seemed more important than feelings. My mom would never allow herself to lose control. Everything was all in its place.

I wasn’t addicted to one particular substance. I liked it all. I wanted to get my hands on anything I could swallow, snort, eat, sniff, you name it. I never ran into heroin, though. Never was in the same room with it, thank God. (That would happen later.)

And then they actually came up with a great idea. They made me take care of somebody who came in legitimately addicted to drugs. They gave me a car so I could drive her around, help her with life. I became really close with that girl, really took her under my wing.

My mom was really affected by what people wrote about her. She had no siblings to share the burden, nobody who understood what it truly felt like. In a way she was the princess of America and didn’t want to be.

But one song, “High Enough,” really stands out now. She wasn’t doing drugs at the time, but she was drinking—some nights way too much—and the song is very clearly about addiction. But this was way before any of us could have conceived that would become such a problem for her, though in retrospect, storm clouds were gathering even then.

But I don’t think it’s just physical. I believe that a body is just a body, and the spirit is ultimately inside of the physical shell, and I don’t think chemicals have anything to do with the spirit. They make the physical addiction to the body—but the root of the addiction comes from being really unhappy. That’s a spiritual problem.

Her addiction would continue through all of the stints in rehab on the basis that she was always in severe and life-threatening withdrawals that no doctor could understand. She felt all of the doctors were too harsh. They wouldn’t give her enough of what she needed, so she was “doing it herself.”

The one thing that she had always really prided herself on was that she was a great mother. She said, “My music wasn’t that successful, I didn’t finish high school, I’m not beautiful, I’m not good enough—but I’m a great mother.” When she started to feel like she wasn’t even that, she couldn’t handle it, so she doubled down.

My mom was such a powerful person that whatever she was doing really affected all of us. Our lives were dictated by the tone she was setting, and that tone became very heavy and hopeless. Our mom, the queen, the fiercest of family leaders, had fallen down. I had mistakenly thought she was so strong-minded that nothing could ever truly hobble her. But of course it could. Enough pain can hobble anyone. She’d been addicted to drugs for the better part of a decade and the drugs created a sense of hopelessness that permeated everything.

“Your brother shot himself in the head! Your brother shot himself in the head!” Christy kept saying, over and over. I could not take it in. I could hear her saying it, but I could not absorb the words, the finality of that statement. I was suddenly filled with the most profoundly painful thought: This is real and there’s nothing I can do.

It was too painful to cry. I distinctly remember thinking, I’ve never seen this in a movie, when someone dies, how it’s too painful to cry.

And when you do eventually cry, it’s a different cry. It feels like something deeper than your emotions is crying out, and it feels like it’s never going to end. Some kind of a terrifying, bottomless pain.

I don’t really know how else to describe watching my little brother, my parents’ only son, being driven away in a coroner’s van, forever. The van just drives away, and you just watch it go.

was in the most pain I’ve ever been in in my life, but I also had the deeply transformative experience of surrendering to that avalanche of pain and not trying to avoid the grief. This was a huge lesson for me—the only way out is through. You must allow pain in to free yourself from it.

I looked at my face as a child and thought, My God, if only anyone could have told you what you were going to go through in this life, what you were going to be up against. That cute little blond-haired child in the matching dress with her mommy. It overwhelmed me.

I closed my eyes and talked to her spirit, just like I had Tupelo’s. “If you need to go, go. If you need to stay, stay.”

She was like a character from the Greek myths—she had human emotions, but she was such a force that sometimes I really thought if she focused hard enough, real thunderbolts would appear. Her power and strength frightened people. She had an uncanny ability to see right into your soul. And she was able to truly, unconditionally love. She had definitely been reincarnated royal every time. My dad and I would joke that if God had ever asked her to come back not as a royal, she would have declined his offer. My mother was the only person who would say no to God.