Presley opened up about the death of her son Benjamin, who died by suicide in 2020, in her posthumous memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown.
Lisa Marie Presley went some great lengths to get matching tattoos with her late son, Benjamin Keough, after his death.
In Presley’s posthumous memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, she got candid about the immense grief she experienced after her son died by suicide in 2020 — a sentiment daughter Riley Keough, who helped compile her mother’s memoir, also detailed in a new interview with Oprah Winfrey.
“She would say, ‘I’m going to die of a broken heart,’ and I think we felt that,” Riley told Winfrey.
Her grief was so all-consuming, in fact, that Presley kept her late son’s body at home on dry ice for two months after he died, even inviting a tattoo artist to see Benjamin so she could could get a replica of his tattoos in order to get some matching ink for herself.
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Riley also honored Benjamin by getting tats that matched his.
As he had his sister’s name written on his collarbone and his mom’s on his hand, as a tribute, both women got Benjamin’s name inscribed on the exact areas — which meant the tattoo artist had to inspect his preserved body in order to get the “placement exactly right.”
“He’s like, OK, do you have any photos?” Riley recalled the tattoo artist asking. “And she was like ‘No, but I can show you.'”
Keough insisted her mom wasn’t “crazy” for letting the tattoo artist inspect her late brother’s body, adding that the moment was very “matter of fact.”
The Daisy Jones & the Six star said the tattoo artist was luckily “very normal about the whole thing” and acted professionally despite the strange request.
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It did, however, make Keough a little uncomfortable, with the film and TV actress telling Winfrey she “stayed quiet” in that moment out of respect for her mom.
“But it was definitely one of the most absurd moments [of my life],” Keough admitted.
Sharing more insight into her decision to keep Benjamin’s coffin in her home following his death, Presley wrote in the memoir that she chose to keep her son’s body because she couldn’t decide whether to bury him in Hawaii — where she owned a home — or at Graceland, the Memphis estate where her father, Elvis Presley, died and is buried.
“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,” Presley wrote. “I found a very empathetic funeral home owner … She said, ‘We’ll bring Ben Ben to you.'”
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The funeral home owner instructed Lisa Marie to keep the room at 55 degrees and keep him on dry ice to preserve the body.
After awhile, the grieving mother “got so used to him, caring for him and keeping him there” that it was no longer out of the ordinary for her.
“I think it would scare the living f–king piss out of anybody else to have their son there like that,” she wrote. “But not me.”
Benjamin was ultimately laid to rest at Graceland, next to his grandfather, following a funeral in Malibu.
Presley was later buried there as well following her death in January 2023.
