BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA - JANUARY 10: Lisa Marie Presley with Icelandic Glacial at the 80th Annual Golden Globe Awards at The Beverly Hilton on January 10, 2023 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Joe Scarnici/Getty Images for Icelandic Glacial)
In her new memoir, the late Lisa Marie Presley opens up about grieving the loss of her son, Benjamin Keough.
The memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, details Presley’s experience navigating her son’s suicide at age 27. The star kept his body on dry ice for two months in her Los Angeles home.
“There is no law in the state of California that you have to bury someone immediately,” she wrote.
Presley’s daughter, actress Riley Keough, wrote some of the memoir and said 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.” Presley’s father, Elvis Presley, died in 1977 when she was just nine years old.
“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,” Presley said in the memoir. With the help of a funeral home owner, she was able to move Benjamin’s body into her home following his death.
In her memoir, Presley explains keeping the room with her son’s body at 55 degrees. She had a difficult time deciding whether to bury him in Hawaii or Graceland.
“That was part of why it took so long,” she said. “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.”
“I felt so fortunate that there was a way I could still parent him, delay it a bit longer so that I could become OK with laying him to rest,” she continues.
Benjamin’s funeral service was held in Malibu, and his mother ultimately decided to bury him in Graceland with his grandfather.
Three years after Benjamin’s death, Presley died at age 54 due to complications from bariatric surgery. Before her death, Riley told her mother she’d help complete the memoir.
“Because my mother was Elvis Presley’s daughter, she was constantly talked about, argued over and dissected,” Riley told People. “What she wanted to do in her memoir, and what I hope I’ve done in finishing it for her, is to go beneath the magazine headline idea of her and reveal the core of who she was. To turn her into a three-dimensional human being: the best mother, a wild child, a fierce friend, an underrated artist, frank, funny, traumatized, joyous, grieving, everything that she was throughout her remarkable life. I want to give voice to my mother in a way that eluded her while she was alive.”
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