Lisa Marie Presley kept her son’s body in her home for two months after his death.
The star has revealed she didn’t bury her son Benjamin Keough’s body until two months after he died by suicide in July 2020, aged 27.
She made the confession in her posthumous memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, which was released on Tuesday, almost two years after she died in January 2023. She was 54.
In the book, completed by Lisa Marie’s actress daughter Riley Keough, the singer explained that she couldn’t decide whether to bury her son in Hawaii or at her late father Elvis Presley’s Graceland estate in Memphis.
“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,” she wrote, according to Page Six. “I found a very empathetic funeral home owner… She said, ‘We’ll bring Ben Ben to you.'”
Lisa Marie kept the room at a certain temperature to preserve her son’s body and “got so used to him, caring for him and keeping him there”.
The singer-songwriter also invited a tattoo artist to look at Benjamin’s body so he could give her and Riley tattoos that matched their loved one’s ink.
Riley wrote of the unique experience, “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. I’ve had an extremely absurd life, but this moment is in the top five.”
Meanwhile, Lisa Marie admitted, “I think it would scare the living f**king p**s out of anybody else to have their son there like that. But not me.”
After the tattoo day, everyone “got the vibe” that it was time to bury Benjamin, according to Riley.
He was eventually laid to rest alongside Elvis at Graceland. Lisa Marie was later buried alongside them.
