Lisa Marie Presley revealed that she left son Benjamin Keough’s body in her house for two months following his 2020 death.
“I think it would scare the living f—ing piss out of anybody else to have their son there like that,” Presley wrote in her memoir From Here to the Great Unknown, released posthumously on Tuesday, October 8. “But not me.”
Presley shared son Benjamin, who died by suicide at age 27, with ex-husband Danny Keough. They also shared daughter Riley Keough, who cowrote Presley’s recently released memoir, finishing the book following her mother’s January 2023 death.
“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,” Presley wrote. “I found a very empathetic funeral homeowner … She said, ‘We’ll bring Ben Ben to you.’”
Presley also revealed that she invited a tattoo artist into her home so she could get matching ink. “No, but I can show you,” Presley told the artist when he asked if she had photos of Benjamin’s ink.
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“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 wrote in the book. “I’ve had an extremely absurd life, but this moment is in the top five.”
Riley went on to say that her mother “got the vibe” Benjamin should be laid to rest after getting the matching tattoos.
“Even my mom said that she could feel him talking to her, saying ‘This is insane, Mom, what are you doing? What the f—!’” Riley wrote, noting that she was “struggling to stay alive” during the funeral for her brother, which was held in Malibu.
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Riley further recalled going through her brother’s phone after his death.
“We found a text sent to my mom a couple of weeks before he died that read, ‘I think something’s wrong with me mentally or something like that. I think I have a mental health issue,’” the Daisy Jones & The Six star wrote. “It’s heartbreaking to me that he only realized he might need help just two weeks before he killed himself.”
Benjamin was laid to rest at Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee. Three years after his 2020 passing, Presley died from a heart attack at age 53. She was buried next to Benjamin on the mansion’s property, alongside father Elvis Presley.
