Lisa Marie Presley kept her son’s corpse cryogenically frozen for 2 months

Lisa Marie Presleywho died in January 2023, left behind a posthumous memoir entitled From Here to the Great Unknown. This book, written in collaboration with his daughter Riley Keoughoffers an intimate vision of the grief she went through after her son’s suicide Benjamin Keough in 2020. Rather than bury her son immediately, Presley chose to keep his body in a separate room in their Los Angeles home, on dry ice, for two months. Riley explains that this period allowed his mother to say goodbye to her son, a process that was already familiar to him after the death of his own father, Elvis Presleyin 1977. Lisa Marie said being able to spend time with her father after his death helped her deal with her grief, and she wanted to do the same with Benjamin.

The journey of his grief

During these two months, Lisa Marie and Riley took the time to decide where to bury Benjamin, hesitating between Hawaii, where he had grown up, and Memphis. Ultimately, Benjamin was buried alongside his grandfather at Graceland. Riley also says that this moment of goodbye was accompanied by many intimate memories, like the tattoos that mother and daughter got together to honor Benjamin. The book also reveals the complexity of Lisa Marie’s emotions as she continued to “take care” of her son in this post-mortem period, a way for her to extend her role as a mother before finally agreeing to let him rest. in peace.

“There is no law in California that requires you to bury someone immediately,” she wrote. “I found a very empathetic funeral director. I explained to him that having my father home after his death had been a great help to me because I could spend time with him and talk to him. She said to me: “We will bring Ben Ben to your house. You can have it there.” » “They told us that if we could take care of the body, we could have it at home,” Riley writes in his section of the book. She adds that it was “really important” for her mother to have “enough time to say goodbye” to her son — as she did before burying her father when she was 9 years old. “We all felt, in some way, that my brother no longer wanted his body in this house,” Riley wrote. “‘He seemed to be saying, ‘This is getting weird, guys.’ Even my mother said she felt he was talking to her, saying, “That’s crazy, mom, what are you doing? What the fuck!” “. The funeral took place in Malibu, before burial at Graceland on the family property.

Three years after her son’s death, Presley was hospitalized following a cardiac arrest. She died only a few hours later, at age 54. An autopsy revealed that his death was due to complications related to intestinal obstruction, a long-term complication of bariatric surgery. A year later, Riley announced her intention to keep a promise to her mother by completing her long-in-the-making memoir. The book was released Tuesday October 8.