Priscilla Presley, 80, shares the heartbreaking story of the last evening she spent with her daughter Lisa Marie Presley at the 2023 Golden Globe Awards. The pair had attended to support Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis and its star Austin Butler. As they walked to their cars afterward, Lisa Marie mentioned a stomach ache and said she needed to go home.
“I said, ‘Absolutely. Go home and take care of yourself,’” Priscilla recalls. Just two days later, on January 12, 2023, Lisa Marie passed away at 54 from a small bowel obstruction linked to prior bariatric surgery.
In her memoir Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis, Priscilla recounts rushing to the hospital and finding her daughter on life support. “I knew from the first moment I walked into Lisa’s hospital room that she was already gone,” she writes. After hours of waiting, doctors confirmed Lisa Marie had no brain activity, leaving Priscilla with the heart-wrenching decision to remove her from the machine.
“She was my wild, rebellious, passionate girl… I said what I had to. ‘Take her off the machine, Doctor,’” Priscilla shares. Lisa Marie was later laid to rest at Graceland in Memphis.
Priscilla continues to cherish her daughter’s memory through a collection of letters Lisa Marie had written over the years. “You never really get over losing a child,” she says.
Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis will be released on September 23 and is available for preorder.
