By Lisa Respers France | CNN
Lisa Marie Presley was devastated when her only son, Benjamin Keough, died at the age of 27 in 2020.
We now know how deeply she grieved.
In “From Here to the Great Unknown,” a new memoir by the late Presley, finished by her daughter, Riley Keough, the pair write that Presley kept her son “in the house with us instead of keeping him at the morgue.”
“They told us that if we could tend to the body, we could have him at home, so she kept him in our house for a while on dry ice,” wrote Keough, who used tapes of her mother sharing her memories to finish the book. “It was really important for my mom to have 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.”
Presley, the only child of the legendary Elvis Presley, was nine years old when he died following an apparent heart attack at age 42 in 1977. The younger Presley died in January 2023 of complications from prior weight loss surgery at the age of 54.
Presley is quoted in her memoir as explaining that her house had “a separate casitas bedroom,” where she kept her son, whom she called “Ben Ben,” after he died.
“There is no law in the state of California to bury someone immediately. I found a very empathetic funeral home owner,” Presley explains in the book. “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 said, ‘Well bring Ben Ben to you. You can have him there.’”
Presley explained that the room where she kept his body had to be maintained at 55 degrees. She wrote that she felt “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.”
Both Presley and her son are now buried at Graceland where her father is also interred.
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