Lisa Marie Presley explained in her memoir why she decided to keep the body of her son Benjamin in her home for two months following his death.
The late daughter of Elvis Presley made the revelation in her memoir, which was published posthumously by her daughter, Riley Keough. “There is no law in the state of California that you have to bury someone immediately,” Presley wrote in the book, “From Here to the Great Unknown.”
“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 continued, per People.
“That was part of why it took so long,” Presley wrote. “I got so used to him, caring for him and keeping him there. I think it would scare the living f***ing piss out of anybody else to have their son there like that. But not me.”
Benjamin, nicknamed Ben Ben by his family, died by suicide in 2020 when he was 27 years old.
Presley explained, “My house has a separate casitas bedroom, and I kept Ben Ben in there for two months … I found a very empathic funeral home owner.”
She continued, “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 [her nickname for her son] to you. You can have him there.’”
“I felt so 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,” she wrote.
Keough wrote that it was “really important” for her mom to “have ample time to say goodbye to him, the same way she’d done with her dad.”
The room with Benjamin’s body was reportedly kept at 55 degrees. Keough also related the experience of a tattoo artist coming over so both mother and daughter could get ink that matched Benjamin’s. When the artist, who came to the house, asked if he could see a photo to copy, Lisa Marie allegedly said, “No, but I can show you.”
“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. I’ve had an extremely absurd life, but this moment is in the top five,” Lisa Marie’s daughter wrote of the experience.
Presley died in 2023 of a small bowel obstruction caused by complications from previous weight loss surgery.
