Lisa Marie Presley’s memoir has revealed a lot about the late daughter of Elvis, including how she handled the death of her only son, Benjamin Keough. In an excerpt from her posthumously released book, From Here to the Great Unknown, the mother of four confessed that she kept Benjamin’s body on dry ice for two months after he died.
Benjamin, who was known as Ben Ben by his family, died by suicide in 2020 at 27 years old. Following police investigations and corner reports, Benjamin’s body was returned to Lisa Marie, who kept him preserved in a bedroom in their Los Angeles home. “There is no law in the state of California that you have to bury someone immediately,” Lisa Marie writes.
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Riley Keough — Benjamin’s sister and Lisa Marie’s eldest daughter — helped to finish the memoir, and writes that it was “really important” for her mother to “have ample time to say goodbye to him, the same way she’d done with her dad,” who died in 1977 when Lisa Marie was 9. “Having my dad in the house after he died was incredibly helpful,” Lisa Marie writes, “because I could go and spend time with him and talk to him.”
To get Benjamin’s body into her home, Lisa Marie explained that she enlisted the help of a kind and understanding funeral home owner. She also noted the use of dry ice to help with the preservation and revealed that the bedroom where Benjamin’s body was kept had to be set to 55 degrees.
Ultimately, it was trying to decide where to bury Benjamin, Hawaii or Graceland, that prolonged the preservation of his body. “That was part of why it took so long,” she writes in the expert shared by PEOPLE. “I got so used to him, caring for him and keeping him there. I think it would scare the living f—ing piss out of anybody else to have their son there like that. But not me.” She went on to share, “I felt so fortunate that there was a way that I could still parent him, delay it a bit longer so that I could become okay with laying him to rest.”
Interestingly, Riley reveals that at one point she and her mother decided to get tattoos in honor of Benjamin, who’d had his mother’s name tattooed on his hand and Riley’s name tattooed on his collarbone. The two decided that they would get his name tattooed on the corresponding areas of their bodies and, in order to get the tattoos perfect, Lisa Marie invited the tattoo artist to see Benjamin’s tattoo on his body for reference. “I’ve had an extremely absurd life, but this moment is in the top five,” Riley quips.
Not long after they got the tattoos, Riley explains, “we all got this vibe from my brother that he didn’t want his body in this house anymore. ‘Guys,’ he seemed to be saying, ‘This is getting weird.’ Even my mom said that she could feel him talking to her, saying, ‘This is insane, Mom, what are you doing? What the f—!!’” Eventually, the Presley-Keough family held a funeral service for Benjamin in Malibu while having him buried in Graceland, with his grandfather Elvis.
Sadly, on Thursday, Jan. 12, 2023, Lisa Marie was rushed to the hospital after suffering a medical emergency. She died some time later. She was 54.
