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She was 'gutted' by his death.
By Alexandra Blogier — Written on Jan 13, 2023
Following the death of Lisa Marie Presley, the only daughter of Elvis and keeper of the Presley family legacy, fans have been reminded of her kind heart in the face of some of her more challenging moments.
Presley died on Thursday, January 12, 2023, after a brief hospitalization for cardiac arrest. She was 54 years old.
Her mother Priscilla Presley confirmed her death in a statement on Thursday evening, hours after paramedics rushed to Lisa Marie’s Calabasas home.
“It is with a heavy heart that I must share the devastating news that my beautiful daughter Lisa Marie has left us,” Priscilla Presley stated. “She was the most passionate, strong, and loving woman I have ever known.”
Overcoming the death of her father and son, Presley faced her share of hardship in life and understood all too well the pressures fame and heartache can place on a person.
"I've dealt with death, grief and loss since the age of 9 years old. I've had more than anyone's fair share of it in my lifetime and somehow, I've made it this far," she once wrote in an essay for People Magazine.
It is that empathy that she carried with her during and after her tumultuous marriage to Michael Jackson.
Lisa Marie Presley once opened up about Michael Jackson in a blog post after his death.
Presley had written her own take on grief and mourning in a blog post titled “He Knew” on MySpace after losing her former husband to a death similar to that of her father.
Presley and Jackson were married from 1994 to 1996, during which time she tried to “save” the King of Pop “from the inevitable,” a process which she claims consumed her, writing “at that time, in trying to save him, I almost lost myself.
Following Jackson’s death in 2009, Presley took on MySpace to grieve and tell of the 'hardest decision' she made during their marriage.
Of her relationship with the world-famous popstar, Presley wrote that “it was an unusual relationship, yes, where two unusual people who did not live or know a 'normal life' found connection… I do believe he loved me as much as he could love anyone and I loved him very much.”
Presley claimed that during their brief marriage, “I wanted to save him from the inevitable which is what has just happened.”
In the blog post, she recalled a “deep conversation about life in general” that she and Jackson shared.
“I can't recall the exact subject matter but he may have been questioning me about the circumstances of my Fathers Death [sic],” she wrote.
“At some point he paused, he stared at me very intensely and he stated with an almost calm certainty, ‘I am afraid that I am going to end up like him, the way he did.’”
She went on to say that she tried to “deter him from the idea,” but Jackson responded by shrugging his shoulders and nodding as if to say that “he knew what he knew and that was kind of that.”
She also referenced “the big gates, the crowds outside the gates, the coverage, the crowds outside the hospital, the Cause of death and what may have led up to it” following Jackson’s death, which reminded her of the death of her father.
“The memory of this conversation hit me, as did the unstoppable tears,” wrote a “gutted” Presley.
She went on to reveal the hardest decision she ever had to make while married to Michael Jackson.
She claimed that the “hardest decision” she ever made in her marriage to Jackson was “to walk away and let his fate have him, even though I desperately loved him and tried to stop or reverse it somehow.”
Post-divorce, Presley “spent a few years obsessing about him and what I could have done different, in regret.”
She went through a wide spectrum of emotions, spending “some years angry at the whole situation,” before she “truly became indifferent” until Jackson’s death, which left her “overwhelmed with sadness, reflection, and confusion at what was my biggest failure to date.”
She wrote of “watching on the news almost play by play the exact scenario I saw happen on August 16th, 1977 happening again right now with Michael (A sight I never wanted to see again) just as he predicted, I am truly, truly gutted [sic].”
Presley attended Jackson's funeral in an attempt to 'apologize.'
In 2010, Presley told Oprah that she was the last person to stand over Jackson’s casket at the public memorial held at the Staples Center in Los Angeles.
Oprah asked if she was able to make peace at that moment, to which Lisa Marie replied, “No, I don’t think I could make peace then. It was more like I wanted to apologize for not being around.”
Following Jackson’s death, she wrote that she hoped “that anyone else who feels they have failed to help him can be set free because he hopefully finally is.”
Here’s hoping that during her life, Lisa Marie released that feeling of failure and felt set free, as well.
Alexandra Blogier is a writer on YourTango's news and entertainment team. She covers celebrity gossip, pop culture analysis and all things to do with the entertainment industry.