Lisa Marie Presley kept her son’s dead body on dry ice for two months after his death so she could properly say goodbye, her new memoir revealed.
27-year-old Benjamin Keough died by suicide in 2020, which left his mother “completely heartbroken, inconsolable and beyond devastated,” at the time.
Her daughter Riley Keough has since finished writing her book — which dove deeper into her grief process — after Presley passed away in 2023 due to effects of a small bowel obstruction.
Highlights
- Lisa Marie Presley kept her son Benjamin's body on dry ice for two months.
- Her decision mirrored how she coped with her father Elvis's death.
- Lisa Marie opened up about ongoing grief, saying you never 'get over it.'
Lisa Marie Presley kept her son Benjamin’s body in her home for two months following his death as a way to cope with her grief
Image credits: Copetti/Photofab/Shutterstock/Vida Press
The 54-year-old was the only child of rock icon Elvis Presley, and her book was the perfect window into how she dealt with her son’s death.
“My house has a separate casitas bedroom, and I kept Ben Ben in there for two months,” Presley wrote. “There is no law in the state of California that you have to bury someone immediately. I found a very empathic funeral home owner.
“I told her that 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. She said, ‘We’ll bring Ben Ben to you. You can have him there.’”
Presley also added, “I think it would scare the living f–king piss out of anybody else to have their son there like that. But not me.”
Her daughter Riley also weighed in on her mother’s decision.
“It was really important for my mom to have ample time to say goodbye to him, the same way she’d done with her dad,” she said. “And I would go there and sit in there with him.”
Indeed, when Elvis died, his open casket was kept safe in his Graceland estate for approximately two months before he was later buried in the property.
Elvis’s daughter had been vocal about how she dealt with the aftermath of her son’s death
Image credits: American Idol 2012 / Getty
On National Grief Awareness Day in 2022, Presley had opened up about the loss of her late son in an essay she shared with People.
“Grief does not stop or go away in any sense, a year, or years after the loss,” she wrote. “Grief is something you will have to carry with you for the rest of your life, in spite of what certain people or our culture wants us to believe.
“You do not ‘get over it,’ you do not ‘move on,’ period.”
She also mentioned that grief is an “incredibly lonely” feeling and said, “Despite people coming in the heat of the moment to be there for you right after the loss takes place, they soon disappear and go on with their own lives and they kind of expect for you to do the same, especially after some time has passed.”
Lisa Marie Presley later died in January 2023 at 54 years old due to complications from a bariatric surgery — a fairly common weight loss procedure — she had gotten years earlier.
Benjamin Keough’s mother and sister both got matching tattoos in his honor
Image credits: Bettmann / Getty
The two got his name tattooed on their collarbone and hand — the exact same place Benjamin had theirs inked on his skin.
Presley’s daughter wrote that the experience was quite strange since her mother had instructed the tattoo artist to see Benjamin’s body in order to get the placement right.
“Lisa Marie Presley had just this poor man to look at the body of her dead son, which happened to be right next to us in the casitas,” she wrote. “I’ve had an extremely absurd life, but this moment is in the top five.”
That moment may have spurred the decision to finally lay Benjamin to rest as Riley said, “Soon after that, we all kind of got this vibe from my brother that he didn’t want his body in this house anymore.”
Both Benjamin Keough and Lisa Marie Presley are buried at Graceland.
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
Image credits: MediaPunch/Shutterstock/Vida Press