Priscilla Presley Reveals Final Message She Gave Lisa Marie (Exclusive)

Priscilla Presley is opening up about the final evening she got to spend with her late daughter Lisa Marie Presley at the 2023 Golden Globe Awards.

Priscilla, now 80, and Lisa Marie attended the show together in support of Baz Luhrmann’s nominated film Elvis and its star Austin Butler, who ended up taking home the award for best actor in a drama. Afterward, the two were supposed to grab a drink nearby, but while walking to their cars, Priscilla says Lisa Marie told her mom that her stomach hurt and that she needed to go home.

“I said, ‘Absolutely. Go home and take care of yourself,’” Priscilla recalls in this week’s PEOPLE cover story. “I asked her if she was okay. Little did we know how bad it was. It struck all of us, we were just dumbfounded.”

Two days later on Jan. 12, 2023, Lisa Marie died at age 54 from a small bowel obstruction that developed after a bariatric surgery she’d had years prior.

“It was the second saddest day of my life, other than losing Elvis,” Priscilla says of her late ex-husband and Lisa Marie’s dad, Elvis Presley. “It took a long time to come to terms with the fact that Lisa was gone.”

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In her new memoir Softly, as I Leave You: Life After Elvis, excerpted exclusively in this week’s print cover story, Priscilla recounts rushing to the hospital to be by Lisa Marie’s side. Earlier in the day, Lisa Marie had been found unresponsive at home by her ex-husband, Danny Keough, with whom she shared son Benjamin (who died by suicide at age 27 in 2020) and daughter Riley, 36.

“I knew from the first moment I walked into Lisa’s hospital room that she was already gone,” Priscilla writes in her book. “She was hooked to a machine that was breathing for her, and she had a heartbeat. There was little brain activity. Her spirit, always so vital, wasn’t there.”

Priscilla says she and the family were at the hospital “all day long.”

“Lisa really wasn’t breathing, so she was on the ventilator,” she says. “For hours we were there waiting, hoping and praying until the doctor came in and said, ‘Priscilla, I’m so sorry, she’s gone.’ We just couldn’t believe it — didn’t want to believe it. It was hard on all of us, it still is.”

Priscilla writes in her book that she had to make the difficult decision to take Lisa Marie off life support.

“They had restarted Lisa’s heart, but there was no guarantee it would keep beating,” she writes. “I asked the doctor, ‘What kind of life will she have if we keep her on that machine?’ He looked at me with compassion and shook his head. ‘No quality of life at all.'”

“I thought about my girl, my wild, rebellious, passionate girl, lying in a vegetative state for the rest of her life,” she continues. “I said what I had to. ‘Take her off the machine, Doctor.’ My voice was barely above a whisper.”

Lisa Marie was later buried on the grounds of her father’s beloved Graceland mansion in Memphis, Tenn.

Since Lisa Marie’s death, Priscilla says she often pages through a book she made of letters her daughter had written to her over the years.

“I read them just to have that nearness to her,” she says. “You never really get over losing a child.”

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