From Here to the Great Unknown

by Lisa Marie Presley

I wasn’t going to be happy until I got some revenge. My mom came up with a plan. She didn’t want to tell me the details because I was still kind of talking to the guy sometimes. But he was dealing blow, I think, so it was arranged that there would be a drug bust by some off-duty cops. She wanted him humiliated in the process. She told me they did an anal probe.

When Ben and I were on the train to Kyoto one day he said to me, half-joking, kind of coyly, “It’s so hard because when I do something new, I get really good at it so fast that it becomes uninspiring.”

After that, we sent him to Memphis, to Graceland, to be buried with his grandfather. And in his casket, I’d quietly placed those yellow Nike sneakers he’d envied when we’d been so happy in Japan.

I 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.