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Lisa Marie Presley kept her son’s body at home for two months after his 2020 death. Presley’s memoir, “ From Here to the Great Unknown ,” published Tuesday, shares why. The book was written by Presley and her actor daughter Riley Keough and finished by Keough after Presley’s death, using tapes her mother had recorded.
Presley, 54, died in January 2023 of a small bowel obstruction that was a complication of bariatric surgery she had years earlier. Presley wrote that after her son Benjamin Keough died in 2020, she kept his body on dry ice for two months in a bedroom at her Los Angeles home, per a People report. Benjamin was 27 when he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
“There is no law in the state of California that you have to bury someone immediately,” Presley said in the book. According to the book, she kept the room at 55 degrees Fahrenheit. Riley Keough and Lisa Marie Presley in 2017.
WWD/Penske Media via Getty Images Riley Keough, 35, said in the book that her mother wanted to “have ample time to say goodbye to him, the same way she’d done with her dad.” Presley was 9 years old when her father Elvis Presley died in 1977, at 42. “Having my dad in the house after he died was incredibly helpful because I could go and spend time with him and talk to him,” Lisa Marie wrote.
She had been mulling where to bury Benjamin — either at Graceland, the home of Elvis, or in Hawaii. “That was part of why it took so long,” she said in the book. “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.” Keough also recalled how after Benjamin died, they got tattoos that matched his tattoos of their names — he had Riley inked on his collarbone and Lisa on his hand.
To do this, Presley invited a tattoo artist to see the tattoos on Benjamin’s body. “I’ve had an extremely absurd life, but this moment is in the top five,” Keough wrote. Later, both mother and daughter got the “vibe” from Benjamin that he didn’t want to be there anymore.
He was buried at Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee. “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,” Presley wrote of the experience. Stories by Amy Kuperinsky ‘The Office’ star reveals breast cancer diagnosis and treatment Justin Timberlake postpones N.
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