Lisa Marie Presley kept son's body on dry ice in home InDaily

The late singer – who died in January 2023 aged 54 – was left devastated when Benjamin Keough took his own life in 2020 aged 27 and decided to keep his body on dry ice in a separate room on the grounds of their Los Angeles house.

In an extract from her posthumous memoir From Here To The Great Unknown obtained by People magazine, she wrote: “There is no law in the state of California that you have to bury someone immediately.”

Benjamin’s sister Riley Keough – who finished the book after her mother’s death – wrote it was “really important” for Lisa Marie to “have ample time to say goodbye to him, the same way she’d done with her dad”, Elvis Presley, who died in 1977 when she was nine.

Lisa Marie wrote: “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 singer enlisted the help of a compassionate funeral director to get Benjamin’s body to her house and had to keep the room where he was kept at 13C, and she felt “fortunate” to be able to continue to care for him while she decided on whether his final resting place should be the family’s Graceland estate or in Hawaii.

She wrote: “That was part of why it took so long.

“I got so used to him, caring for him and keeping him there. 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.”

At one point, Riley and Lisa Marie decided to get tattoos in Benjamin’s honour, opting to be inked on the corresponding body parts where he had had his own tributes to his family, with the Daisy Jones And The Six star getting hers on her collarbone and his mother on her hand.

To get the artwork perfect, Lisa Marie invited the tattoo artist to see Benjamin’s own inkings up close.

Riley wrote: “I’ve had an extremely absurd life, but this moment is in the top five.”

Shortly after they had their tattoo tributes, Lisa Marie and Riley began getting a “vibe” that Benjamin wanted to be moved from the house.

Riley wrote: “We all got this vibe from my brother that he didn’t want his body in this house anymore. ‘Guys,’ he seemed to be saying, ‘This is getting weird.’ Even my mom said that she could feel him talking to her, saying, ‘This is insane, Mom, what are you doing? What the f***!’ ”

Benjamin was eventually laid to rest in Graceland with his grandfather Elvis, after a funeral service in Malibu.

–  AAP