Elvis Presley was the most famous young man in America. And on a summer night in Memphis, he sat on a step and cried like a little boy.
In August 1958, Elvis was in the Army, stationed at Fort Hood in Texas. Word came that his mother, Gladys, was very sick. She had been hospitalized in Memphis. Elvis begged for emergency leave. When the Army said no at first, he threatened to walk out and take whatever punishment came. They let him go.
He got to her bedside on August 12. She was 46 years old and worn down by illness. Two days later, in the early hours of August 14, 1958, her heart gave out. Elvis and his father Vernon were not in the room. They had gone home to Graceland to rest for a few hours. The phone call came anyway.
People who were there said the two men held onto each other on the front steps of Graceland and wept out loud. Elvis kept saying the same thing over and over. “Everything I have is gone.”
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To understand it, you have to know what she was to him. Gladys had lost his twin brother at birth. She walked Elvis to school. She worried over him. When the money was thin in Tupelo, she made it stretch. He called her every single day when he was on the road. They even had their own private baby words for things, a little language just for the two of them.
The funeral was held the next day at the Memphis Funeral Home. Around 3,000 people stood outside. Inside, the Blackwood Brothers, her favorite gospel group, sang for her. Elvis had to be helped along. He touched the casket and told her he loved her.
Weeks later, he shipped out to Germany. Friends said something in him had gone quiet and stayed quiet.
Years later, when Elvis remodeled Graceland’s Meditation Garden, he had his mother brought there to rest. And when his own time came in 1977, they laid him down right beside her.
Everyone close to him says that Elvis was never really the same after that August.