Everyone grieves differently, but according to her memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, Lisa Marie Presley had an especially difficult time letting go of her son Benjamin Keough after his death.
The book, which was released posthumously and co-written by her daughter Riley Keough, explains that Lisa Marie “found a very empathetic funeral homeowner” who allowed her to keep her 27-year-old son’s body in her home for two months after his tragic death by suicide in July of 2020.
The late daughter of Elvis Presley specified that the body wasn’t kept right in the middle of her home, writing, “My house has a separate casitas bedroom, and I kept Ben Ben in there for two months. There is no law in the state of California that you have to bury someone immediately.”
Harper Vivienne Ann Lockwood, Lisa Marie Presley, Priscilla Presley, Riley Keough, and Finley Aaron Love Lockwood attend the Handprint Ceremony honoring Priscilla Presley, Lisa Marie Presley And Riley Keough at TCL Chinese Theatre on June 21, 2022 in Hollywood, California. Lisa Marie Presley’s memoir, co-written with her daughter Riley Keough, was released in October 2024.
Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images
Riley, 35, wrote in her section of the memoir about one of the final moments before her brother was finally given a funeral. Her mom wanted to get a tattoo that would match Benjamin’s, so she invited a tattoo artist to their home to give her the ink. In what the Daisy Jones and the Six actress called one of “the top five” most absurd moments in her life, she recalled how Lisa Marie told the artist that though she didn’t have photos of her son’s tattoo, she could “show” him the tattoo on the body itself. “Lisa Marie Presley had just asked this poor man to look at the body of her dead son,” Riley wrote, commenting on the strangeness of the circumstances.
Getting the tattoo apparently allowed Lisa Marie to move on and finally bury her son. “Even my mom said that she could feel him talking to her, saying ‘This is insane, Mom, what are you doing? What the f—!'” The family finally laid Benjamin to rest in Malibu in 2020, two months after his death.
