Lisa Marie Presley wanted a proper grieving process.
In her posthumous memoir From Here To The Great Unknown—which was completed by her daughter Riley Keough—the daughter of Elvis Presley and Priscilla Presley detailed why she kept her son Benjamin Keough on dry ice for two months after his 2020 death and how she took inspiration from the death of her father.
“There is no law in the state of California that you have to bury someone immediately,” Lisa Marie wrote in the book, per People, of her decision to keep Benjamin’s body in a casita near her home. “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.”
And Riley added that it was “really important,” for her mother—who shared the actress and Benjamin with ex Danny Keough—to “have ample time to say goodbye to him, the same way she’d done with her dad.”
After Elvis’ death in 1977—when his only daughter was just 9 years old—he was buried on the property of his Memphis estate Graceland, where Lisa Marie spent time as a child. In addition to replicating the grieving process she had for her father, Lisa Marie—who resided in California before her 2023 death—had another reason for keeping her son’s body preserved before his burial: the debate of whether to bury him in Memphis or Hawaii.
“That was part of why it took so long,” Lisa Marie—who was also mom to 15-year-old twin daughters Harper and Finley Lockwood with ex Michael Lockwood—admitted elsewhere in her memoir. “I got so used to him, caring for him and keeping him there. I think it would scare the living f–king piss out of anybody else to have their son there like that. But not me.”
Dave M. Benett/Getty ImagesShe emphasized, “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.”
Ultimately, though, Lisa Marie had to let her son go, as Riley called the experience of keeping Benjamin at their property for so long became “absurd.”
“We all got this vibe from my brother that he didn’t want his body in this house anymore,” Riley wrote in the memoir, out Oct. 8. “‘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–k!’”
But while Lisa Marie was eventually able to have Benjamin laid to rest near his grandfather on Graceland’s property—where she herself was also buried—Riley has shared before that her mother was never really able to work through her grief.
“My mom tried her best to find strength for me and my younger sisters after Ben died, but we knew how much pain she was in,” Riley told People last month. “My mom physically died from the after effects of her surgery, but we all knew she died of a broken heart.”
