OPENING UP

Three monhts after her son's suicide, Lisa Marie Presley expresses her "bottomless" grief

Lisa Marie Presley finally breaks her silence following a tough few months.

It was an unfathomable loss. On July 12, Lisa Marie Presley’s only son, Benjamin Keough, was found dead of a selfinflicted gunshot wound at the age of 27. “Lisa struggled for months to wrap her head around what happened,” says an insider. “She was devastated.” Yet she kept to herself, making no public statement regarding Ben’s suicide and withdrawing from the outside world.

Until now. On Oct. 21 — which would have been Ben’s 28th birthday — Lisa, 52, took to Instagram, posting a picture of her son blowing out candles at an earlier, happier celebration, along with a caption in which she expressed her profound grief. “My beautiful, beautiful angel,” wrote Lisa, who is also mother to Riley Keough, 31, and twins Finley and Harper Lockwood, 12. “I worshipped the ground you walked on, on this earth and now in Heaven. My heart and soul went with you. The depth of the pain is suffocating and bottomless without you every moment of every day. I will never be the same. Please wait for me my love, and hold my hand while I stay to continue to protect and raise your little sisters and to be here for Riley. I know you would want that.”

A SENSE OF GUILT

According to the insider, Lisa’s three daughters are practically the only thing keeping her going these days, as she continues to cope with a grief that’s often incapacitating. “It’s so hard, but she’s determined to set a good example for the girls,” the insider says of Lisa, who battled addiction issues in the past and is involved in an ongoing custody battle with Finley and Harper’s father, guitarist Michael Lockwood (see sidebar). “Riley and others have been enormous sources of support. But Lisa is heartbroken.”

Compounding her grief

is a feeling of guilt. A family friend has said Ben struggled with depression before his death and “Lisa keeps reiterating that she wishes she could have done more to help him with that,” shares the insider. “There have been a lot of ‘what ifs’ running through her head.”

But there’s no going back. The finality of the situation was never more clear than when Ben was recently laid to rest at Graceland, the Memphis, Tenn., estate once owned by his look-alike grandfather, Elvis Presley. “Over the last few months, Lisa would sob, thinking about how Ben’s dreams of having a career and his own family will never be fulfilled,” the insider says. “It crushes her knowing that she’ll never see Ben walk down the aisle or hold a child in his arms. She’s still hurting immensely and has a long way to go in the grieving process.”