Lisa Marie Presley Memoir Recap/Discussion: Chapter 8 (pt two)
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Previous recaps: Chapters 1 & 2 || Chapter 3 || Chapter 4 || Chapter 5 || Chapter 6 (pt one) || Chapter 6 (pt two) || Chapter 7 || Chapter 8 (pt one)
Lisa Marie Presley’s memoir From Here to the Great Unknown was 85% done and spread across 16 tapes when she passed away in January 2023. The book consists of Lisa's recollections, daughter Riley Keough's assessments, memories and clarifications, as well as occasional input from Danny Keough, Lisa Marie’s first husband and best friend (and Riley's father).
Heavy trigger warning for drug abuse, talk of suicide and general potentially disturbing subject matter. Please use caution.
Chapter Eight: Ben-Ben (pt two)
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• The family of Riley, her parents, the twins, cousins and close friends stayed together for six months in the same house in grief. All they talked about was Ben and did things Ben would have liked, as was Lisa's insistence. Since Lisa Marie and Danny were always open to the kids having deep questions about the meaning of life and stuff, the family was able to have frank, deep discussions about loss and love and express their grief through art and music. Riley was grateful Lisa Marie forced everyone to experience the grief because friends were encouraging her to distract herself.
• Riley remembers she and Benjamin were similar, she felt like they were twins, he was just smarter and wittier. They had the same sense of humor, sounded like each other and talked the same.
• No one believed Benjamin would have killed himself sober and everyone agreed it likely wasn't what he truly wanted. That was hard for the family.
• Riley has never been angry at her brother for what he did, just sadness and guilt over him feeling dying was the only solution.
• Riley says the guilt is worse with suicide. She felt personal responsibility because he was her little brother and she failed him. Her parents felt a worse guilt and wished they had done things differently. She says she doesn't understand the relationship between free will and destiny and she accepts that, but she believes Benjamin didn't truly want to die.
https://instagram.com/p/DA2xURbO8ds
• Riley wishes she can see Benjamin again but she has ultimately accepted things had to happen for a reason and Benjamin made her realize every little thing matters. She called the grief transformative, surrendering to the pain and not trying to avoid it. Ben's death made her reframe her life’s hard and cruel moments. Everything matters, every moment of happiness, every bit of pain.
• Riley has had to learn to hold joy and suffering and indifference and hope simultaneously. She says even now when she does something, “grief’s volume is turned down so I can just barely function, but the rest of the time it's cranked up all the way and I can't hear anything.” A friend asked her if the grief gets better and she says no, the grief is always there but she could hear Ben telling her there was a point and to keep going.
• Riley knew Lisa wasn't going to survive Ben's death. All she wanted to do was talk about Ben and mourn. Lisa would say her life was over and she was only here for her surviving children but she was torn because she had three children with her and one child somewhere else.
• However, Lisa surprised everyone- she didn't relapse, she was far more present after Benjamin's funeral. Lisa tried to live her life- she tried to have fun on vacation in Hawaii, she tried to reconnect with friends from England, she tried to connect with old friends. “She really tried to hold on to hope even though it was like sand through her fingers.”
• However Riley cannot paint an uplifting picture of Lisa Marie rising from the ashes. Her mother mostly stayed home, smoking and staring, that was her grief.
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• Riley saw Lisa Marie every weekend and three times during the week. If Lisa had it her way, Riley would have lived with her. If Riley missed even an hour on the weekend, Lisa would ask what could Riley possibly be doing.
• Lisa thought about making more music but she wasn't there yet. She ended up helping grieving parents and held grief groups in her home. She wrote an op-ed about grief:
Hi. In honor of it being National Grief Awareness Day , I wrote an essay about Grief which was posted today on People. I thought I’d post it here in the hopes that anyone who needs to hear all of this it helps in some way.
https://t.co/BUKK6oHnjp
- Lisa Marie Presley (@LisaPresley) August 31, 2022
• Lisa Marie also thought about doing a podcast about grief. She desperately wanted to connect with people with a shared experience and nothing else moved her. That was what it looked like for Lisa Marie to try to make it for her other kids and Riley found it beautiful.
• Lisa Marie went to Hawaii because she felt Ben wanted her there. Benjamin loved Hawaii and he knew Lisa went to Hawaii to heal. One day, she suddenly found herself planning a trip to Hawaii and she said out loud she knew it was Benjamin because she didn't want to go. She was there on the anniversary of his death and she knew not to invalidate that. She stopped wanting to die every day.
• Riley's daughter Tupelo was born in August 2022. The first week, Lisa Marie would come to do the night shift so Riley and her husband could sleep, and Lisa Marie instantly became obsessed with Tupelo. She felt she had a special connection with her granddaughter and would take Tupelo to the garden to bond. Lisa Marie bought toys and a swing set for her house so Tupelo could sleep over.
• However, despite Lisa's love and efforts to live, everyone knew Lisa would die of a broken heart.
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• Lisa says she was still taking baby steps into getting out of grief. She was trying to heal by helping people. A kid wrote a letter to Riley thanking her and telling her that they didn't kill themselves after her telling them what it would do to their family and those who are left behind. That helped Lisa Marie.
• Lisa Marie thinks if she can help people by sharing her story of addiction and her experience with Benjamin's suicide, then that's honoring Ben-Ben.
• Lisa Marie recalled suddenly thinking about Benjamin's nanny, remembering songs the nanny would sing to Ben and she said out loud “okay, sweetheart, I get it, I hear you.” The next morning, Riley came over and told her the nanny had died last night, and Lisa told her Ben-Ben told her. She knew Ben was telling her something, but she didn't know what. She says she can hear Benjamin and she was never going to doubt that again.
• Lisa remembers a photo of herself with her parents as a child and she told herself if she only knew what she was going to go through as she stared at her child self. She says she does the same with her children, she looks at pictures of them when they were little before the traumas and she gets very sad.
“After my father died, people always described me as sad. It was like a permanent imprint on my face after that, in my eyes. But that sadness was not in this photograph. That forlorn little princess bullshit hadn’t reared its ugly head yet. The sadness started at nine when he passed away, and then it never left. Now it’s even worse- my eyes are downcast permanently in this grief. The view is pretty limited.
I always thought, Why does everybody always say I look sad? And now I get it. I don’t think my spark will ever come back, to be perfectly honest. Grief settles. It’s not something you overcome. It’s something that you live with. You adapt to it. Nothing about you is who you were. Nothing about how or what I used to think is important.
The truth is that I don’t remember who I was. The other day somebody said, “I know you better than anyone,” and I said, “No, you don’t. You don’t have a fucking clue who I am. Because I don’t even know who the fuck I am anymore.” The real me, whoever I had been, detonated completely a year and a half ago.”
• Lisa Marie says she has to let the grief consume her. “Let it step on the gas, step on the brake, step on the gas, step on the brake, I'm just driving with it.” She says if she looks back on her life, she'd get overwhelmed and cry at how fucked up her life has been. “Try, fail, try, fail, good, bad, fail.”
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• She's surprised she's still alive. She cannot believe she's still alive, it feels wrong to be alive without Benjamin. But now she's able to look at the good things, the good moments still happening. “Sometimes I feel like there’s nothing left, no purpose…I have three remaining children, so I fight it, I fight it, I fight it, I fight it, I fight it.”
• Riley says Lisa's health began to deteriorate even as she tried to fight the grief and keep it together for the twins. Lisa started to complain of a stomach ache and she would have fevers. Lisa Marie was trying to hold on to hope but Riley says her heartbreak was growing. Despite Riley scheduling doctors appointments, Lisa never went.
• In 2022, Lisa got an infection and had to have her uterus removed, which was incredibly hard for her and she said “it held all my babies.”
• In October 2022, as the family walked around Disneyland, Lisa said she didn't feel well and was nauseous. Riley again told her to go to the doctor and again she didn't get a response.
• Lisa wonders what's the point of an autobiography. She thinks her objective would be to help people, and that would be fulfilling. People call her strong but she doesn't know what it matters for, she's not strong. But she's still here.
“I didn't lose my mind, even though I wanted to. And I could have. I didn't relapse or die. Or kill myself, which are three things I thought about all day long for the first eight or nine months after Ben-Ben died. I've been vacillating between all three. But I didn't.
I have two little girls that I have to be a mother to. I keep my focus on that. My son was concerned about his sisters. It was his main objective. The few last-moment texts he fired off said to watch and protect his sisters. They don't know this. I won't let them know until they're older.
I know Ben-Ben would be infuriated with me if I died and joined him. He would be mad at me in hell or heaven, wherever we're going.”
• We get Lisa's voice on the audiobook, saying she wanted to die until she went to Hawaii for her son. She romanticized death, hoped for it, she wanted to be with her son. She didn't want to be there anymore, there was no purpose. She does come alive now. Now she wants to help people.
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For substance abuse treatment and mental health referrals in the US, contact the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's (SAMHSA) National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357). UK-wide, call 116 123 or text SHOUT to 85258
Last chapter Tuesday.
Source: me and my handy dandy book and audible account, pics: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, Twitter