Lisa Marie Presley's Daughter Had 'A Feeling' About Her Death The Moment It Happened

Earlier this month, Riley Keough appeared on The Drew Barrymore Show to discuss her late mother’s posthumous memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, which Lisa Marie Presley had started writing and Keough completed. While on the show, Keough shared that she had an unsettling intuition on the day her mother passed, before receiving any official news. Presley passed away on January 12, 2023, and Keough texted her father to see if it was true.

As reported by HuffPost, Keough said, “I just had a feeling, I don’t know. There had been incidents before, you know, health incidents, and I didn’t have the same feeling. I felt this sort of surrender in the moment.” In the memoir, released earlier this month, Keough recalled the frantic moment she boarded a plane to be with her mother after learning from her father that she had been rushed to the hospital.

Paramedics suspected Presley had suffered a heart attack. While Keough was mid-flight, her father and husband updated her saying that her mom had been resuscitated and had a pulse. Trying to stay positive, Keough’s best friend, who was with her on the plane, reassured her, saying heart attack survivors make it through all the time. However, Keough said, “I don’t think she’s going to live through it. I don’t think she wants to.”

Keough also sensed her mother was between two worlds, caught in a fragile balance between life and death, as reported by TODAY. At that moment, she closed her eyes on the plane and began communicating with her mother’s spirit, feeling a connection beyond the physical world. Presley's daughter recalled, “If you need to go, go. If you need to stay, stay.” Her dad later told her that Presley had suffered another cardiac arrest. When Keough didn’t get any further updates, she somehow knew her mom was no more.

Keough further discussed a strange decline in Presley's health. She reveals that things only became worse once her mother was hospitalized in November 2022 for an infection. Presley kept a bottle of Pepto-Bismol by her bedside and often complained of nausea and stomach aches. However, in an interview with People, Keough expressed the opinion that Presley passed away from heartbreak as she was unable to move past the terrible death of her son Benjamin, who killed himself in 2020 at the age of 27. Presley's daughter said, "My 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." 

Presley admitted in 2022 that she would never fully recover from the loss of her son, but Keough's memoir revealed that they began to find some light by helping others in their grieving process. Keough also characterized Nick Cave's 2016 documentary One More Time with Feeling as a moving examination of grief, which provided her some comfort. She had vowed to help her mother finish writing the memoir, but after Presley’s passing, Keough turned to old tape recordings of her mother’s voice, using them to keep her promise and ensure the story was told just as her mom wanted.