Riley Keough Is Still ‘Trying to Make Sense of’ Mom Lisa Marie Presley and Brother Benjamin’s Deaths (Exclusive)

Riley Keough is opening up about the back-to-back tragedies of losing her brother Benjamin Keough and mother Lisa Marie Presley. 

“It went from joy for 25 years of my life to this nightmare in about a year and a half,” the Daisy Jones & the Six actress tells PEOPLE. Benjamin died by suicide at age 27 in 2020, and Lisa Marie died three years later at age 54 of a small bowel obstruction, a long-term complication from bariatric surgery. 

**”I had an instinct Ben was the love of my mom’s life,” Riley writes. “Just as Elvis had with his mother, and my mom had with Elvis, my brother and my mom had a kind of ‘I can’t live without you’ relationship. They shared a very deep soul bond.”** 

 A decade into Lisa Marie’s addiction to opioids (which she started taking following the birth of her twins Finley and Harper Lockwood in 2008), Benjamin’s own addiction struggles began growing in private, as did his depression. 

 “My brother was just an incredibly sensitive person, and there was addiction there with him,” Riley tells PEOPLE. “But it’s something I am constantly replaying in my mind going, ‘What happened?’ Because it felt like everything was fine and extremely normal for many years. So it was very destabilizing and shocking. I think my brother’s addiction was his way of coping with his own discomfort and emotional pain. And it was a few years that got just really incredibly difficult.”

 Following Benjamin’s death, Riley writes in From Here to the Great Unknown she “knew” her mom wouldn’t survive long. “I knew any time I got with her after would be a gift,” she writes. “I couldn’t imagine her living without my brother.” 

The link in their deaths, Riley says, is “something I think about all the time, and I’m trying to make sense of it all the time.” 

**”Like I said before, what has been the hardest about all of this is that we had such great and beautiful times, and most of our life was that,” she says. “So it was really hard for us to understand the decline in the family.”**   

“A lot of our life was very happy,” she says. **”The tragedy within my family has been so heartbreaking, but we also had an incredible amount of fun and these beautiful experiences that I don’t know if people get to have very often. I feel extremely grateful for that. We’re mostly always in laughter and living in a comedy. That’s how we went through our life. My life has not been a tragedy.** It’s been a large collection of many short stories of all genres.” 

 As for what’s gotten her through the grieving process, Riley says it’s just “feeling the grief” itself. “It feels so scary, grief, and this bottomless pit of sadness,” she says. “In the moments you can handle it, allow it. If you can’t, it’s OK to take breaks from it. It’s a lifelong journey, I think.”