Two years ago, this newspaper reported the death of Benjamin Keough, the son of Lisa Marie Presley and the grandson of the King of Rock and Roll, calling it “the latest chapter in Elvis Presley’s family curse.” Keough was 27 years old. On Thursday, January 12, a new Presley family tragedy occurred. Lisa Marie, a singer, celebrity and Elvis’s only child, died after suffering a cardiac arrest in Los Angeles. She was 54 years old.

Last August, Lisa Marie explained her relationship with loss in an essay she wrote for People magazine. “Death is part of life whether we like it or not — and so is grieving…Grief is something you will have to carry with you for the rest of your life, in spite of what certain people or our culture wants us to believe. You do not ‘get over it,’ you do not ‘move on,’ period.” She went on to discuss how her life had been marked by death, pain and loss since childhood. Merely looking at newspaper archives is enough to prove it. The Presley family history is peppered with divorces, premature deaths, drugs and debts. It is a sad curse from which, generation after generation, family members have been unable to escape.

On August 16, 1977, Elvis died at the age of 42 at Graceland, his legendary home in Memphis. He was overweight, addicted to drugs, and had a group of friends and acquaintances that the press referred to as the Memphis Mafia, who were not a good influence. The afternoon of his death, the singer told his girlfriend at the…