Day: January 12, 2023

Lisa Marie Presley, a singer-songwriter, Elvis’ only daughter, and a dedicated keeper of her father’s legacy, died Thursday after being hospitalized for a medical emergency. She was 54.

Her death in a Los Angeles hospital was confirmed by her mother, Priscilla, a few hours after her daughter was rushed to the hospital after having a medical emergency at home.

“It is with a heavy heart that I must share the devastating news that my beautiful daughter Lisa Marie has left us,” Priscilla Presley said in a statement. “She was the most passionate, strong and loving woman I have ever known.”

Presley, the only child of Elvis and Priscilla Presley, shared her father’s brooding charisma — the hooded eyes, the insolent smile, the low, sultry voice — and followed him professionally, releasing her own rock albums in the 2000s, and appearing on stage with Pat Benatar and Richard Hawley among others.

She even formed direct musical ties with her father, joining her voice to such Elvis recordings as “In the Ghetto” and “Don’t Cry Daddy,” a mournful ballad that had reminded him of the early death of his mother (and Lisa Marie’s grandmother), Gladys Presley.

“It’s been all my life,” she told The Associated Press in 2012, speaking of her father’s influence. “It’s not something that I now listen to and it’s different. Although I might listen closer. I remain consistent on the fact that I’ve always been an admirer. He’s always influenced me.”

Famous from the start

Her birth, nine months exactly after her parents’ wedding, was international news and her background was rarely far from her mind. With the release last year of Baz Luhrmann’s major musical feature “Elvis,” Lisa Marie and Priscilla Presley had been attending red carpets and award shows alongside stars from the film.

She was at the Golden Globes on Tuesday, on hand to celebrate Austin Butler’s award for playing her father. Just days before, she was in Memphis at Graceland — the mansion where Elvis lived and died — on January 8 to celebrate her father’s birth anniversary.

Presley lived with her mother, an actor known for “Dallas” and the “Naked Gun” movies, in California after her parents split up in 1973. She recalled early memories of her dad during her visits to Graceland, riding golf carts through the neighborhood, and seeing his daily entrances down the stairs.

“He was always fully, fully geared up. You’d never see him in his pajamas coming down the steps, ever,” she told The Associated Press in 2012. “You’d never see him in anything but ‘ready to be seen’ attire.”

Elvis Presley died in August 1977, when he was just 42, and she 9 years old. Lisa Marie was staying at Graceland at the time and would recall him kissing her goodnight hours before he would collapse and never recover. When she next saw him, the following day, he was lying face down in the bathroom.

“I just had a feeling,” she told Rolling Stone in 2003. “He wasn’t doing well. All I know is I had it (a feeling), and it happened. I was obsessed with death at a very early age.”

Life in the spotlight

She would later make headlines of her own. Struggles with drugs and some very public marriages. Her four husbands included Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage.

Jackson and Presley were married in the Dominican Republic in 1994, but the marriage ended two years later and was defined by numerous awkward public appearances, including an unexpected kiss from Jackson during the MTV Video Music Awards and a joint interview with Diane Sawyer when she defended her husband against allegations he had sexually abused a minor.

Her other celebrity marriage was even shorter: Cage filed for divorce after four months of marriage in 2002.

“I had to sort of run into many walls and trees,” she told the AP in 2012. “But now I can also look back at it and tell you all the stuff that was going on around me and all the different people around me and all the awww — and it was not a good situation anyway. That wasn’t helping. Either way, it was a growing process. It was just in a different way. It was just out in front of everybody all the time. Because it’s all documented of course.”

Lisa Marie became involved in numerous humanitarian causes, from anti-poverty programs administered through the Elvis Presley Charitable Foundation to relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina. She would receive formal citations from New Orleans and Memphis, Tennessee for her work.

Presley had two children, actor Riley Keough and Benjamin Keough, with her former husband Danny Keough. She also had twin daughters with ex-husband Michael Lockwood.

Benjamin Keough died by suicide in 2020 at the age of 27. Presley was vocal about her grief, writing in an essay last August that she had “been living in the horrific reality of its unrelenting grips since my son’s death two years ago.”

“I’ve dealt with death, grief and loss since the age of 9 years old. I’ve had more than anyone’s fair share of it in my lifetime and somehow, I’ve made it this far,” she wrote in an essay shared with People magazine.

“But this one, the death of my beautiful, beautiful son? The sweetest and most incredible being that I have ever had the privilege of knowing, who made me feel so honored every single day to be his mother? Who was so much like his grandfather on so many levels that he actually scared me? Which made me worry about him even more than I naturally would have?” the essay continued. “No. Just no … no no no no …”

Graceland

Lisa Marie became the sole heir of the Elvis Presley Trust after her father died. Along with Elvis Presley Enterprises, the trust managed Graceland and other assets until she sold her majority interest in 2005. She retained ownership of Graceland Mansion itself, the 13 acres around it, and items inside the home. Her son is buried there, along with her father and other members of the Presley family.

Lisa Marie Presley is a former Scientologist — her son was born in 1992 under guidelines set by Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, according to an AP story at the time — but later broke with Scientology.

Lisa Marie and Priscilla Presley would make regular trips to Graceland during huge fan celebrations on the anniversaries of Elvis’ death and birthday. One of the two airplanes at Graceland is named the Lisa Marie.

After her first album “To Whom It May Concern,” in 2003, some fans came out to see her perform just out of curiosity given her famous family, she told the AP in 2005.

“First I had to overcome a pre-speculated idea of me,” she said of the barriers to becoming a singer-songwriter.

“I had to sort of burst through that and introduce myself, and that was the first hurdle, and then now sing in front of everybody, and then that was the second one, and I’m the offspring of — you know, who I’m the offspring of — I had a few hurdles to get through, no doubt about it,” she continued. “But the scales never tipped in the other direction too much.”

Source: Voice of America

Guan Yao, who lives in California, never thought that on his last video chat with his grandmother in Beijing he would watch her die.

He had installed a tiny robot camera in his grandmother’s home some time ago so they could be in constant contact after he moved to the U.S. in 2016. She took to the device, holding it almost as if it provided the comfort of his touch.

Guan was video chatting with her throughout the last four hours of her life on December 22.

The 85-year-old had tested positive for COVID-19 and had had a fever for days. Two days before dying, she finally got a bed in a hospital.

Guan watched her blood oxygen saturation level suddenly turn from a low of 70 to a question mark. The doctor announced her death after an electrocardiogram.

“Her final death certificate said kidney failure because she had kidney disease before,” Guan told VOA Mandarin from his home in the Los Angeles area. “Not COVID.”

On the same day, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention issued an epidemic report stating that “there were no new deaths of COVID.”

Before his grandmother died, Guan, 39, an IT professional, had already lost four relatives in his extended family since December 14: his father-in-law, his father, an uncle and another elderly female relative. Among them, only Guan’s grandmother and uncle had tested positive for COVID-19. The others died before getting tested.

His father-in-law died of asthma. His father had heart disease and died in his sleep. His uncle’s medical images showed the white lungs associated with COVID-19 when he was sent to the hospital, but his death certificate states Parkinson’s disease as the cause.

China’s “zero-COVID” policy reversed almost overnight after three years on December 7, when the government issued the “New Ten Measures” for epidemic prevention that announced the relaxation of coronavirus-containment controls.

A tsunami-like COVID outbreak followed, its magnitude suggested by countless tragedies reported every day on social media despite China’s relentless internet censorship.

“The last day of 2022 ended with a funeral, and 2023 started with another funeral. In just half a month, the old people around here have been infected and died one after another. The sadness is lasting a bit too long,” wrote a poster from Jiangsu province.

“I work in a hospital, and I see people die every day. The crematorium works 24 hours every day, but people still have to wait in line,” wrote a poster from Guangdong.

Guan said, “The reopening was too sudden, prompting such a large-scale outbreak, and the medical system was completely unprepared for a large number of infection cases.”

Until January 7, the official death toll from COVID-19 remained at 30.

“The statistics are definitely underreported by a lot,” said Guan, a political activist who is a board member of Dialogue China, a nongovernmental think tank established by Tiananmen student leader Wang Dan. “My aunt said that she was in the emergency room and saw four or five people die and be carried away in such a short period of time.”

Tan Hua, who is in Shanghai and is infected with COVID-19, told VOA Mandarin that “we don’t have access to the official data now, and we don’t pay attention to the data on severe disease and death, because it’s completely inconsistent with how we feel around us.”

When Guan’s father died, the family found a one-stop service from the funeral home and spent about 30,000 yuan or roughly $4,400 to cremate him — twice the usual price. Without paying extra, they had to wait in a long queue.

When Guan’s grandmother died, the hospital said the government had a collective arrangement and that all the bodies would be stored in the funeral home, waiting for collective cremation.

An official notice informed the family that the morgues in hospitals and funeral homes were full and that local warehouses had been turned into temporary morgues until the collective cremation scheduled for January 19.

For unknown reasons, Guan said his grandmother’s body was not sent to the temporary morgue and was cremated on December 31.

Three years ago, when the pandemic broke out in Wuhan, Guan bought masks for his family in Beijing and told them not to believe the government. He thought they were spreading lies to cover up the pandemic. He never imagined that after three years of lockdown, China would witness death on such a scale.

“The three years [of lockdown] were meaningless,” Guan said. “It’s really unacceptable that so many loved ones have passed away. Whenever I think about it, I get really, really angry and sometimes I bang on the table at breakfast.”

When other overseas Chinese media approached Guan, hoping to interview him about the deaths in his family, he declined.

“I worried that they [the government] were going to do something under the rug,” he said. “My grandmother was such an important relative, and if she couldn’t be cremated because of my [media] appearance, my family would hate me for the rest of my life.”

Now that all five of his relatives have been cremated, Guan said that he doesn’t mind telling his story.

“Five relatives left in eight days. It’s too unusual. Someone has to tell the story,” he said.

The Lunar New Year arrives on January 22 this year. Guan’s father always spent New Year’s Eve with his mother, Guan’s grandmother. Being so far away across the Pacific Ocean, Guan would make video calls to his grandmother on the holiday, sharing New Year’s blessings, chatting about family affairs and making jokes.

This year, he keeps thinking of his grandmother who died not knowing that her only son had died three days before her.

“There is no one left home,” Guan said. “To be honest, there is nothing to celebrate this year.”

Source: Voice of America