In December 2022, Lisa Marie Presley called on her daughter, Riley Keough, to help her finish a memoir she had started writing. Lisa Marie died of a small bowel obstruction just one month later at the age of 54.
That memoir, titled From Here to the Great Unknown, was released on Tuesday, Oct. 8, nearly two years after her death. And one of the biggest topics she wrote about in the book was her son’s death in 2020.
One of the ways she chose to cope with his death was by keeping his body on dry ice in a bedroom in her LA home for two months after he died. She defended and explained her decision in the new memoir.
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“There is no law in the state of California that you have to bury someone immediately,” she wrote, according to PEOPLE. She added that the room he was in had to be kept at 55 degrees.
Benjamin Keough, who she shared with ex-husband Danny Keough, was just 27 years old when he died by suicide on July 12, 2020. His death was something Lisa Marie never managed to get over.
According to Riley, who helped write a lot of the book, having Benjamin on dry ice was “really important” for her mother because it gave her “ample time to say goodbye to him, the way she’d done with her dad.”
Her father, Elvis Presley, died in 1977 when Lisa Marie was just 9 years old.
“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,” Lisa Marie wrote in the memoir.
Lisa Marie explains why it took so long to bury Benjamin
With her son on dry ice, Lisa Marie was tasked with finding the perfect place to bury him. According to her, that’s part of why it took her so long to bury Benjamin.
She was trying to decide between Hawaii and Graceland.
“I got so used to him, caring for him and keeping him there. I think it would scare the living piss out of anybody else to have their son there like that. But not me,” she writes.
It wasn’t until Lisa Marie and Riley got his name tattooed on their body that they felt it was time to lay him to rest.
“We all got this vibe from my brother that he didn’t want his body in this house anymore,” Riley wrote.
“’Guys,’ he seemed to be saying, ‘This is getting weird.’” she continued. “Even my mom said that she could feel him talking to her, saying, ‘This is insane, Mom, what are you doing?’”
The tattoos were extra special to the family
The tattoos that Lisa Marie and Riley got were extra special because they mimicked the tattoos Benjamin had on his body.
He had his mother’s name tattooed on his hand, and his sister’s name tattooed on his collarbone. So, to honor him, Lisa Marie got his name tattooed on her hand, and Riley got it tatted on her collarbone.
You can see Riley’s tattoo below:
But, according to Riley, Lisa Marie wanted the tattoo to be perfect. So she invited the tattoo artist to the room where Benjamin’s body was to see the tattoos in person.
Riley described this as a “top five” moment in her “extremely absurd life,” but it’s what her mother wanted.
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Benjamin was eventually laid to rest in the Meditation Garden at Graceland, where his grandfather, Elvis Presley, and other family members are buried. Lisa Marie was buried next to Benjamin three years later.