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.

For the world when seen through a little girl’s eyes Greatly resembles Paradise.

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.

He was respectful, though—he wasn’t rude to people, he wasn’t an angry person, he didn’t live there. Some people full-on live in destruction, others buy some real estate and walk around in anger for a little while. My dad would just visit.

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

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. You can still find things from that day coming up at auction.

That was the first time I really felt the loss—obviously from my dad passing away, but more than anything, I felt I was stuck with this woman. It was a one-two punch: He’s dead and now I’m stuck with her.

My mom was very strict, in fact. She was never a friend, someone I could talk to. 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.

By this point in my life, my mother’s role was just to be a chronic stop sign. She didn’t try to talk to me, hang out with me, be a friend. I was very much in love with my father’s side—they were wildly colorful people and I related to them in ways I couldn’t with my mother.

If you don’t have something to keep you focused, or some kind of purpose, it’s hard out there. Life is not easy.

Seemingly she had done what she set out to do: She had created a very sweet little life in the countryside. So the first couple years were truly magical. We had no idea, though, that her pill use was very slowly increasing.

When I started talking to a therapist, it was really nice to hear somebody talk back and say, “Hey, you’re not fucked up,” or “You need to stop shooting yourself in the foot.”

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.

It escalated to eighty pills a day.

I believe that we’re all born innocent, and that everyone’s nature is innately good, but they get fucked by their surroundings.

In the throes of her addiction, if you wanted to stop her, you were out. To me she would say, “You don’t understand. You’re not an addict.”

People have misconceptions about suicide. I always thought if someone is talking about it, they won’t do it.

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

We’re told not to cry from the moment we’re born. We spend much of our lives trying to disassociate. When we feel something bad we try to make ourselves feel better, because we are afraid of it.

Learning to hold joy and suffering and indifference and hope simultaneously.

But despite all this love she still had inside her, and all of her effort to live, we could all see it. We could all feel it coming. We all knew my mom was going to die of a broken heart.

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.

We laid her to rest next to my brother, across from her father.