Priscilla Presley on Helping Son Navarone Through Addiction (Exclusive)

Priscilla Presley is lifting the curtain on how she helped her son, Navarone Garcia, through his struggles with addiction.

Two weeks after Priscilla’s grandson Benjamin Keough, the son of the late Lisa Marie Presley and her ex-husband Danny Keough, was buried following his death by suicide at age 27 in 2020, Navarone, 38, came to his mom asking for help getting off fentanyl. The synthetic opioid is 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine.

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“I would be in bed with him, and he’d say, ‘My legs hurt, my legs hurt,'” Priscilla, 80, recalls to PEOPLE in this week’s print cover story. “I’d get up and massage his legs. Now I know what it’s like with someone who goes through withdrawal. It’s horrible. A lot of people can’t get through it and go right back to it. It was hard.”

After 22 days of withdrawal, Priscilla says Navarone (Priscilla’s son with ex Marco Garibaldi) hit a turning point. Months later, his recovery stalled when he relapsed on heroin, a drug he previously told PEOPLE he first started using in his teens. Priscilla cared for him at her home once again.

“Finally one day he came to me and said, ‘Mom, I want to get off drugs. I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to hurt you anymore. Will you help me?'” Priscilla says. “I said, ‘I will absolutely help you.’ So, he stayed at my home and I slept with him every night, and he had withdrawals every night. I don’t wish that on anyone because there’s really nothing you can do. You can’t give them more drugs, that’s for sure. They have to go through it.”

Priscilla — also mom to the late Lisa Marie Presley with ex Elvis Presley — writes in her new memoir Softly as I Leave You: Life After Elvis that while “heroin withdrawal is bad, it is not as bad as fentanyl withdrawal.”

“My son says that withdrawing from fentanyl was a 10,” she writes. “Withdrawing from heroin was a 6.5. Whatever the numbers, the second withdrawal was bad enough. Again, we marshaled the troops … And again, my son pulled through.”

After detoxing from heroin, Priscilla says she noticed a major difference in Navarone.

“He’s been sober ever since, so I’m really happy for him,” she says. “He’s in a good place. We made it.”

Priscilla wants anyone going through similar struggles to know that sometimes help “doesn’t work right away.”

“Navarone has been in rehab three or four times,” she says. “That’s how powerful drugs are, they guide you.”

She also suggests being “gentle and understanding” when trying to navigate a loved one’s addiction struggles.

“Just keep talking to them and say, ‘Look what’s happening to you, look how you’re feeling,'” she says. “You got to be there for them no matter what, and hopefully one day they’ll come out of it. It may happen, it may not. It took a long time, but Navarone was ready. I got lucky.”

Softly, As I Leave You: Life after Elvis will be published on Sept. 23 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.