Lisa Marie Presley kept her son Benjamin's body on ice to help her grieve

After death When Lisa Marie Presley's son Benjamin Keough committed suicide in 2020, the singer and only child of Elvis Presley struggled to process her son's death.

“I just couldn't imagine a world where she would make it without him,” Presley's granddaughter Riley Keough told Oprah Winfrey on Tuesday during a CBS special, “The Presleys: Elvis, Lisa Marie and Riley.”

Keough spoke about her mother's posthumous memoir: From here to the great unknownwhich she co-wrote, and her family's time at Graceland in Memphis, where Lisa Marie spent part of her childhood. After her brother's death, Keough said her mother would say, “I'm going to die of a broken heart.”

During the interview, Winfrey recalled Lisa Marie telling her that she didn't know if she could move on after her son's suicide. “I knew this was the end for her. You know?” Keough said. “I think I was grateful because I felt like I had borrowed time.”

Winfrey also asked Keough to read a passage from the memoir in which her mother wrote, “Ben was very, very, very like his grandfather, in every way.” He even looked like him. Ben was so similar to him that it scared me. I didn't want to tell him because I thought it would be too much for a child. We were very close. He would tell me everything. Ben and I had the same relationship as my father and his mother. It was a fucking generational cycle. Gladys loved my father so much that she drank herself to death out of fear for him. Ben had no chance.”

Keough said that in the book, Lisa Marie explained why she decided to keep her late son's body on dry ice in her Los Angeles mansion for two months until it was ready for burial.

“I believe the plan was to bury him here with their father, and we wouldn't get (to Graceland) for about three weeks,” said Keough, who added that her brother would remain at the funeral home during that time. “I think she just didn't like the idea of ​​him being far away,” the actress said, referring to Lisa Marie. “She didn't know what was being done, and I think that given our family, she just wanted to be in control of the situation … and also just wanted to be a mother.”

Keough said Lisa Marie felt comforted as she sat next to her brother's body. The Daisy Jones and the Six star also shared that during her mother's grieving process, Lisa Marie expressed a desire to get a matching tattoo with her son on his hand – in the same place he got tattooed.

“I think that on paper the story sounds completely crazy and absurd. But I – my mom was completely herself,” Keough said. “She wasn’t a crazy woman.”

Keough said her mother invited a tattoo artist to look at Benjamin's body to find the right placement. “(The tattoo artist), God bless him, acted normal through the whole thing,” Keough said. “It’s definitely one of the most absurd moments.”

As the artist left, Keough said she said to her mother, “Do you know how fucking crazy what you just did was?”

Lisa Marie died on January 12, 2023 after suffering cardiac arrest at her home in Calabasas, California. She was buried next to Benjamin at Graceland. A few months before she was buried, Lisa Marie wrote an open essay for People about feeling “destroyed” after her son’s death.

“Death is part of life, whether we like it or not – and that also applies to grief. There is so much to learn and understand on this topic, but here is what I know so far: First, grief does not stop or disappear in any way a year or several years after the loss,” Presley wrote. “Grief is something you have to carry with you for the rest of your life, despite what certain people or our culture would have us believe.”