Lisa Marie Presley kept her son Benjamin’s dead body at home for 2 months, ‘I got so used to him’

Lisa Marie Presley had a difficult time coping with the loss of her son Benjamin after he died by suicide in 2020. In her posthumous memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, she explained how she kept the 27-year-old’s body on dry ice. at her Los Angeles home. The book, released Tuesday, was completed by Lisa Marie’s daughter, Riley Keough, after she died from bowel obstruction in 2023.

Lisa Marie Presley kept her son’s body at home for two months after he died

“My house has a separate casitas bedroom and I kept Ben Ben in there for two months. There is no law in the state of California that you have to bury someone immediately. I found a very empathetic funeral home owner … She said, ‘We’ll bring Ben Ben to you. You can have him there.’,” the late singer wrote in her bombshell memoir.

Riley noted 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” Elvis Presley, who died when Lisa Marie was just nine. “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,” the Lights Out singer wrote.

Lisa Marie reflected on how keeping his son’s body at her home allowed her time to move on. She explained that the room was kept at a temperature of 55 degrees to preserve Benjamin’s body, adding that she faced difficulty in deciding a resting place for him, going back and forth between Hawaii and Graceland. “That was part of why it took so long,” she wrote.

“I got so used to him, caring for him and keeping him there,” the Dirty Laundry singer continued, adding, “I think it would scare the living f***ing piss out of anybody else to have their son there like that. . But not me.” “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.”

The family eventually went on to hold a funeral for Benjamin in Malibu and laid him to rest at Graceland alongside Elvis. In 2022, Lisa Marie told People that she was “destroyed” by her son’s death but had to “keep going for my girls.” “I keep going because my son made it very clear in his final moments that taking care of his little sisters and looking out for them were on the forefront of his concerns and his mind,” she added.