When Lisa Marie Presley lost her only son to suicide in 2000, she did not know how to say goodbye.
What she does did know is she wanted to spend more time with him.
She eventually did say goodbye after grieving in her own way by keeping the 27-year-old “in the house with us instead of keeping him at the morgue,” CNN reported.
Presley, the only child of Elvis Presley, the King of Rock & Roll, wrote about her grief in “From Here to the Great Unknown.”
The new memoir was finished by her daughter, Riley Keough, after Lisa Marie Presley’s death in 2023.
“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,” Keough wrote.
Keogh was able to finish the book by using tapes of her mother sharing her memories.
“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,” Keough said. “And I would go and sit in there with him.”
Presley was 9 years old when Elvis died of an apparent heart attack at in 1977. He was 42.
Lisa Marie Presley died of complications from prior weight loss surgery when she 54.
Presley wrote in her memoir that her house had “a separate casitas bedroom,” where she kept her son 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 wrote. “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, ‘We’ll bring Ben Ben to you. You can have him there.’”
Presley said the room where he was had to be kept at 55 degrees.
She said 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 OK with laying him to rest.”
Ben Keough as well as his mother were laid to rest at Graceland close to where Elvis is buried.
