From Here to the Great Unknown

by Lisa Marie Presley

My mother told me that she’d thought about trying to fall off her horse to cause a miscarriage. She didn’t want to gain pregnancy weight. She thought that wouldn’t be a good look for her as Elvis’s wife. There were so many women after him, all of them beautiful. She wanted his undivided attention. She was so upset that she was pregnant that initially she’d only eat apples and eggs and never gained much weight. I was a pain in her ass immediately and I always felt she didn’t want me.

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.

He had a little plaque on the wall up there with a poem that always broke my heart. It’s titled “Why God Made Little Girls”:

God made the world with its towering trees Majestic mountains and restless seas Then paused, and said, “It needs one more thing, Someone to laugh and dance and sing To walk in the woods and gather flowers, To commune with nature in the quiet hours.” So God made little girls, With laughing eyes and bouncing curls,

With joyful hearts and infectious smiles Enchanting ways and feminine wiles And when He’d completed the task He’d begun, He was pleased and proud of the job He’d done For the world when seen thr...

I have a vague memory of this one conversation we had in that room about a passage that Elvis had underlined. I started to call someone to help me

remember it, but realized that there’s no one left to call.

Looking back, there was really only one thing I was sure of: that I was loved by my dad.

My mom learned from these experiences to put her children before her partners.

That afternoon, once they took him away—and this is something I’ve been upset about my whole life—it turned into a free-for-all. Everybody went to town. Everything was swiped, wiped clean—jewelry, artifacts, personal items—before he was even pronounced dead.

This was a huge lesson for me—the only way out is through. You must allow pain in to free yourself from it.