Priscilla Presley is opening up about late daughter Lisa Marie Presley’s eyebrow-raising decision to keep her son’s body at home for more than two months following his death.
In Priscilla’s new book, Softly As I Leave You: Life After Elvis — which hits shelves Tuesday, September 23 — she touched on how, following her grandson Benjamin Keough’s suicide in July 2020, Lisa Marie kept his body on dry ice.
“Lisa spoke to a sympathetic funeral director about the legal requirements for interring a body,” Priscilla, 80, recalled. “She found out that there was no law in California against keeping a body at home as long as certain health requirements were met.”
Benjamin tragically died in his mom’s Calabasas home, and Priscilla noted that Lisa Marie had rented another house nearby, “as none of the family could bear” to “return” to the place where he had passed away.
“The new place had a detached room, and they moved him in there and kept the temperature at fifty-five degrees. He was kept in a coffin filled with dry ice,” the Naked Gun actress writes. “Lisa spent most of her time with him. She couldn’t bear to let him go.”
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According to Priscilla, Benjamin’s body “remained at home with Lisa for another two and a half months, until Lisa felt he no longer wanted to be there.”
At that point, Benjamin was taken to Graceland and laid to rest in the Meditation Garden near his late grandfather, Elvis Presley.
The businesswoman also recounted how, when her ex died in 1977, Lisa Marie similarly “stayed with Elvis’s body as much as she could,” because the young girl “didn’t want to leave him.”
“We would go to visit him afterward, when the house was quiet,” she penned. “I remembered us kissing him goodbye late that last night. Being with Elvis after death had comforted Lisa. So did being with Ben. We all grieve in our own way.”
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