“I hope I can love my daughter the way you loved me, the way you loved my brother and my sisters. Thank you for giving me strength, my heart, my empathy, my courage, my sense of humor, my manners, my temper, my wildness, my tenacity," read the eulogy.
Riley Keough is breaking her silence about losing her mom and battling her grandmother for control of Graceland in the September issue of Vanity Fair.
The 34-year-old "Daisy Jones and the Six" star said that she and Lisa Marie Presley were able to have one final night together, having had dinner just hours before her mother tragically passed away in January.
“That was the last time I saw her," Keough said. "I remember thinking about how beautiful she looked, and that was my strongest memory of the dinner.”
The two shared a close bond throughout Keough's life, she said in the interview, noting that they grew even closer when the actress moved back home for six months after the suicide of her brother Benjamin in 2020.
“After that, I would still sleep at her house like two or three times a week," Keough said.
A few days after her mother's death, Keough and her husband Ben Smith-Petersen traveled to Graceland with their infant daughter Tupelo to lay Lisa Marie to rest. Once there, Keough became so overwhelmed with emotion that her husband had to read her eulogy for her mother.
“I hope I can love my daughter the way you loved me, the way you loved my brother and my sisters," the eulogy read, in part. "Thank you for giving me strength, my heart, my empathy, my courage, my sense of humor, my manners, my temper, my wildness, my tenacity. I’m a product of your heart.”
Above all, Keough said, she was proud and in awe of her mother.
“She was just so unapologetically herself in every circumstance, and so strong,” Keough said.
A few weeks after her mother's death, Riley fund herself in a legal battle with her grandmother, Priscilla Presley, over Graceland and control of the estate of Elvis Presley.
In the end, Keough got control of both the property and the estate after agreeing to pay her grandmother a lump sum of $1.4 million.
“When my mom passed, there was a lot of chaos in every aspect of our lives. Everything felt like the carpet had been ripped out and the floor had melted from under us," Keough said.
She added: "We are a family, but there’s also a huge business side of our family. So I think that there was clarity that needed to be had.”
As for her relationship with Priscilla, Riley says that "things will be happy" between the pair.
"She’s a beautiful woman, and she was a huge part of creating my grandfather’s legacy and Graceland. It’s very important to her. He was the love of her life. Anything that would suggest otherwise in the press makes me sad because, at the end of the day, all she wants is to love and protect Graceland and the Presley family and the legacy. That’s her whole life," Keough said. "So it’s a big responsibility she has tried to take on. None of that stuff has really ever been a part of our relationship prior. She’s just been my grandma.”
At this point though, ownership of Graceland a bittersweet for Riley.
"I always had positive and beautiful memories and association with Graceland," Keough said. "Now, a lot of my family’s buried there, so it’s a place of great sadness at this point in my life.”
