Lisa Marie Presley’s posthumous memoir From Here to the Great Unknown provides a deeply personal look into how the star coped with the devastating loss of her son, Benjamin Keough, who died by suicide at age 27 in 2020.
In the memoir, Lisa Marie reveals that she kept Benjamin’s body on dry ice in a bedroom of their Los Angeles home for two months, allowing herself time to grieve. “There is no law in the state of California that you have to bury someone immediately,” she writes. This decision mirrored her experience after the death of her father, Elvis Presley, in 1977.
Lisa Marie’s daughter, Riley Keough, recalls in the memoir that it was “really important” for her mother to “have ample time to say goodbye to him, the same way she’d done with her dad.”
The memoir describes how Lisa Marie brought Benjamin’s body into the home with the help of a compassionate funeral home director and kept his room at 55 degrees. “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,” she writes.
During this period, Lisa Marie and Riley honored Benjamin with matching tattoos. Lisa Marie even brought the tattoo artist into the room where Benjamin’s body lay so they could replicate his existing tattoos. Riley writes, “I’ve had an extremely absurd life, but this moment is in the top five.”
Eventually, Lisa Marie felt a change in the atmosphere. “We all got this vibe from my brother that he didn’t want his body in this house anymore,” Riley recalls. “Even my mom said that she could feel him talking to her, saying, ‘This is insane, Mom, what are you doing? What the f—!’” Lisa Marie ultimately chose to bury Benjamin at Graceland, alongside his grandfather, Elvis Presley.
In a touching conclusion, Riley places a pair of her yellow Nikes in Benjamin’s casket—shoes he had loved. Riley reflects on how she helped her mother complete the memoir before her sudden death in 2023. “What she wanted to do in her memoir, and what I hope I’ve done in finishing it for her, is to go beneath the magazine headline idea of her and reveal the core of who she was.”
