Nearly two years have passed since Lisa Marie Presley â the daughter of Elvis and Priscilla Presley â died at the age of 53, and now, her daughter is speaking out. In a new interview, Riley Keough said that despite her mom’s official cause of death, she actually “died of a broken heart” after spending three years grieving the loss of her son, Benjamin, in 2020.
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Riley spoke with People magazine about her late mother.
Though Lisa Marie’s official cause of death was due to a small-bowel obstruction that had formed after a previous bariatric surgery years earlier, Riley told People she knows how hard the death of her brother was on her mom also played a part.
âMy mom tried her best to find strength for me and my younger sisters after Ben died, but we knew how much pain she was in,â she said. âMy mom physically died from the after effects of her surgery, but we all knew she died of a broken heart.â
Benjamin died in 2020.
In July 2020, TMZ was the first to report that Benjamin had died by suicide at the age of 27. An autopsy conducted by the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner’s Office revealed that his cause of death was a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
At the time, Roger Widynowski, Lisa Marie’s manager, told TMZ in a statement, “She is completely heartbroken, inconsolable and beyond devastated but trying to stay strong for her 11 year old twins and her oldest daughter Riley. She adored that boy. He was the love of her life.”
Lisa Marie wrote an essay about her grief in 2022.
In a piece she penned for People, she wrote that the choice to keep going after Benjamin’s death is “constantly challenging,” but she did it for her daughters.
“I keep going because my son made it very clear in his final moments that taking care of his little sisters and looking out for them were on the forefront of his concerns and his mind. He absolutely adored them and they him,” she wrote. “My and my three daughters’ lives as we knew it were completely detonated and destroyed by his death. We live in this every. Single. Day.”
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Riley recently finished her mother's memoir.
Riley has been working on Lisa Marie’s unfinished memoir, filling in the gaps with tapes her mom recorded talking about her life and with her own memories. The finished book, titled From Here to the Great Unknown, will be released on October 8.
She told People that writing about Benjamin’s death was “incredibly difficultâŻto write about, as wasâŻmy momâs descent into addiction.⯠And her own death, of course.”
Riley has continued to share memories with her brother on social media.
Since Benjamin’s death, Riley has often marked important dates in her brother’s life, such as his birthday, by sharing photos of them growing up together on Instagram.
Shortly after he died, she wrote alongside a photo of the two of them together, “I would give anything for 1 more minute with you little brother.”
