Today marks the thirty-ninth anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. Elvis was only forty-two when he died, so he would’ve been eighty-one years old.
Instead of reaching the age of a senior citizen, though, Elvis died in the prime of his life. Who knows what he would have done professionally and personally if he had lived.
One of the saddest things about Elvis’s death is that it could have been prevented. The public could see that before he died, Elvis was out of shape and clearly not the man he once was. If the public could see this, surely those closest to him could.
It seems like Elvis’s closest friends could see their friend’s decline, but chose to ignore it or chose not to do anything about it. Elvis surrounded himself with a collection of people known as the Memphis Mafia. These people seemed to provide emotional support for Elvis when he was dealing with the strange aspects of fame and celebrity.
On the other hand, Elvis’s friends and employees didn’t seem to acknowledge that he used drugs. According to these people, if Elvis was using anything, he was using what they called medication.
Did this denial contribute to his death? By saying that Elvis was on medication, Elvis’s associates hinted that a doctor approved the substances he took, the amounts he took, and the frequency at which he took them.
But calling the substances medications obscures the fact that Elvis was abusing these drugs, even if a doctor prescribed them. Denying problems doesn’t make them disappear. If anything, denial makes problems worse because no one is doing anything to solve the problems.
That seems to be the case for Elvis. In the words of Elvis’s associates, he was using medication in a healthy way, not abusing drugs in an unhealthy way. This denial might have killed Elvis.
