Lisa Marie Presley kept her son's body on ice for two months after his death

Warning: There is mention of suicide in this story.

Lisa Marie Presley was so overcome with grief after the death of her son Benjamin Keough that she kept his body wrapped in dry ice in her home for two months. According to NBC, the shocking revelation is included in the new memoir. From here to the great unknownwhich daughter Daisy Jones and the Six Star Riley Keough, completed after her mother's death at age 54 in January 2023.

“My mother had my brother in our house instead of keeping him in the morgue,” Keough wrote in the book. “They told us if we could take care of the body we could have him home, so she kept him on dry ice in our house for a while.”

Keough said it was important for her mother – the only child of late rock legend Elvis Presley – to have enough time to say goodbye to her son, who died by suicide in 2020. “Just like she had done with her father. And I would go there and sit with him,” she said, pointing out that California has no laws dictating exactly when a body must be buried or disposed of. Keough used archival tapes of her mother's memories to complete the book.

“My house has a separate casitas bedroom, and I put Ben Ben there for two months,” said Presley, who began working on the memoir before her death; Presley died of a small intestine obstruction caused by complications from a previous weight-loss surgery. “There is no law in the state of California that says you have to bury someone immediately. “I found a very compassionate funeral director,” Presley wrote. “I told her that having my father in the house after he died was incredibly helpful because I could spend time with him and talk to him. She said, 'We'll bring Ben Ben (her nickname for her son) to you.'”You can have him there.'”

She added: “I think it would scare the hell out of anyone else to have their son there like that. “But not me.” Lisa Marie was nine years old when Elvis died in 1977.

According to reports, the temperature in the room where Benjamin's body was located was 55 degrees, and Presley and Keough had tattoos made to match Benjamin's body by an artist who came to their home. When asked if they had photos of the piece they wanted to recreate, Lisa Marie told him, “No, but I can show you,” referring to an ink that Benjamin had with Keough's name on his collarbone and had another with Presley's name on his hand; Mother and daughter had Benjamin's name tattooed on matching body parts.

Despite the unusual rules the Presleys lived by, Keough said the tattoo incident was one of the most bizarre she's ever experienced. “Lisa Marie Presley had just asked this poor man to look at her dead son’s body, 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 5,” she wrote.

Shortly thereafter, one of Keough's brothers made it clear that he no longer wanted the body in the house, and Keough took a cue from their deceased sibling and imagined how he might have witnessed the scene. “'Guys,' he seemed to say, 'this is getting weird.' Even my mom said she could feel him talking to her and saying, 'This is crazy mom, what are you doing?' What the fuck!'” Keough said.

Accordingly PeopleThe book details how the family held a memorial service for Benjamin in Malibu and Keough placed a pair of her yellow Nikes, which her brother had always loved, in the casket. In a previous interview with People Ahead of the book's release, Keough revealed: “My mother died physically from the after-effects of her surgery, but we all knew she died of a broken heart.”

Both Presley and her son are buried at Graceland, where Elvis is also buried.