Lisa Marie Presley, the late daughter of rock ‘n’ roll legend Elvis Presley, kept the body of her son Benjamin Keough at her home for two months following his tragic suicide in 2020.
This unusual and controversial decision has come to light through Presley’s posthumous memoir, “From Here to the Great Unknown,” which was completed by her daughter Riley Keough after Lisa Marie’s own death in January 2023.
The memoir details the extreme measures taken by the grieving mother in the aftermath of her son’s death. According to the book, Presley utilized a separate bedroom in her California home to house her son’s body, which she kept on dry ice.
“My house has a separate casitas bedroom and I kept Ben Ben in there for two months,” Presley writes in the memoir, using her nickname for her son.
Presley justified her actions by citing California state law, which does not mandate immediate burial.
“There is no law in the state of California that you have to bury someone immediately,” she explains in the book. “I found a very empathetic funeral home owner… She said, ‘We’ll bring Ben Ben to you’.”
The decision to keep Benjamin’s body at home was partly influenced by Presley’s own experience with her father’s death.
She writes, “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.”
Maintaining the body at home presented unique challenges. Riley Keough reveals in the memoir that they “had to keep Benjamin’s room at a constant 55 degrees in order to keep the body from decomposing.”
The family even invited a tattoo artist to the house to get tattoos matching Benjamin’s own.
“Lisa Marie Presley had just asked this poor man to look at the body of her dead son, which happened to be right next to us in the casitas,” Riley writes. “I’ve had an extremely absurd life, but this moment is in the top five.”
Presley was acutely aware of how her actions might be perceived.
“I think it would scare the living f–king p–s out of anybody else to have their son there like that,” she wrote. “But not me.”
“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,” she said.
Riley recalls, “We all got this vibe from my brother that he didn’t want his body in this house anymore. ‘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!'”
Ultimately, Benjamin was laid to rest at Graceland in October 2020, alongside his grandfather Elvis. Lisa Marie would join them there just over two years later, following her death at age 54 in January 2023.