CNN
—

Lisa Marie Presley was devastated when her only son, Benjamin Keough, died in 2020 at the age of 27.

We now know how deeply she grieved.

In “From Here to the Great Unknown,” a new memoir by the late Presley completed by her daughter Riley Keough, the couple writes that Presley kept her son “in our home instead of keeping him in the morgue.”

“They told us if we could take care of the body we could have him at home, so they kept him in our house on dry ice for a while,” wrote Keough, who used tapes of her mother sharing her memories to tell the story to complete. book. ‘It was very important that my mother had enough time to say goodbye to him, just as she had done to her father. And I would sit there with him.

Presley, the only child of the legendary Elvis Presley, was nine years old when he died in 1977 at the age of 42 after an apparent heart attack. The younger Presley died in January 2023 at the age of 54 from complications resulting from a previous weight-loss surgery.

Presley is quoted in her memoir explaining that her home had “a separate casitas bedroom,” where she kept her son, whom she named “Ben Ben” after he died.

“There is no law in the state of California that immediately buries someone. I found a very empathetic funeral home owner,” Presley explains in the book. “I told her that having my father around after he died was incredibly helpful because I could spend time with him and talk to him. She said, “Bring Ben Ben to you. You can have him there. ”

Presley explained that the room where she kept his body had to be kept at 55 degrees. She wrote that she felt “lucky that there was a way I could still raise him, and put it off a little longer so I could be okay with letting him rest.”

Both Presley and her son are now buried in Graceland, where her father is also buried.