A posthumous memoir written by Lisa Marie Presley is bringing new details on how the late musician dealt with the 2020 death of her son, Benjamin Keough, to light.
In “From Here to the Great Unknown,” Presley said she kept Benjamin Keough’s body on dry ice for two months at her Los Angeles home after he died by suicide at age 27.
“My house has a separate casitas bedroom, and I kept Ben Ben in there for two months,” Presley wrote in the book, according to NBC News. “There is no law in the state of California that you have to bury someone immediately.”
She also shared that her family took a similar approach while grieving the 1977 death of her father, music legend Elvis Presley.
“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 wrote. “She said, ‘We’ll bring Ben Ben to you. You can have him there.’”
“I think it would scare the living fucking piss out of anybody else to have their son there like that,” she continued. “But not me.”
Lisa Marie Presley was still at work on “From Here to the Great Unknown” when she died last year at age 54. The book is co-authored by her daughter, actor Riley Keough, who used audio recordings left behind by her mother to finish it.
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The “Mad Max: Fury Road” star wrote in the book that her mom’s decision to keep her brother’s body at home gave the family “ample time to say goodbye to him, the same way she’d done with her dad.”
“And I would go and sit in there with him,” Keough added.
However, the turning point, she said, came when both she and her mother decided to get tattoos that were similar to one that Benjamin Keough had on his collarbone. In order to keep the designs consistent, Presley invited the tattoo artist to her home to see her son’s tattoos up close.
“I’ve had an extremely absurd life, but this moment is in the top five,” Riley Keough wrote. “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 now interred at Graceland, Elvis Presley’s estate in Memphis, Tennessee.
“From Here to the Great Unknown,” which was published Monday, contains a number of other striking revelations about Lisa Marie Presley’s life. Elsewhere in the book, she delved into her decision to marry Michael Jackson in 1994. She claimed the King of Pop, who was then 35, told her that he was a virgin before their wedding.
“I think he had kissed Tatum O’Neal, and he’d had a thing with Brooke Shields, which hadn’t been physical apart from a kiss,” she wrote.