It's been more than 16 years since Lisa Marie Presley shocked the world by making out with her then-husband Michael Jackson on stage at the VMAs, but the daughter of Elvis revealed in an interview with Oprah Winfrey that she's only grown to truly understand and appreciate Jackson in the 15 months since the King of Pop's death.
Video: Lisa Marie Presley on "Oprah"
In a segment that aired yesterday (Oct. 21) on Oprah's talk show, Presley revealed that she had spent the day of Jackson's hospitalization and subsequent death bizarrely consumed with grief before she even heard what had happened to her ex-husband.
Actor John Travolta was one of the first people to tell Presley, who was married to Jackson for 19 months, the news that Jackson had been hospitalized. Presley went on to tell Winfrey that it was only after Jackson had passed that she began to understand the relationship she had shared with him in the mid 1990s.
"For some reason, I don't know what happens when someone passes away and this is what's come of it," Presley explained. "But I've come to have all this love again and understanding for him. I don't know why it had to take all that to have this happen. That upsets me a bit."
She admitted that the two didn't keep in touch after their divorce in 1996, but in her new appreciation for Jackson she wishes that she would have called him, even just to check in.
"I know it's naive to think that I could have [saved him] but I wanted to. Had I made a call, had I stopped being so shut off from him, had I just said 'How are you?' I really regret that I didn't."