Following the death of Lisa Marie Presley‘s son Benjamin Keough by 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 during a CBS special“The Presleys — Elvis, Lisa Marie and Riley,” on Tuesday.
Keough opened up 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 stayed for part of her childhood. Following her brother’s death, Keough said that 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 continue after her son’s suicide. “I knew this was the end of her. You know?” Keough said. “I think I felt grateful, because I felt like I was on borrowed time.”
Winfrey also asked Keough to read a passage from the memoir, in which her mother wrote: “Ben was very similar to his grandfather, very, very, very, and in every way. He even looked like him. Ben was so much like him, it scared me. I didn’t want to tell him because I thought it was too much to put on a kid. We were very close. He’d tell me everything. Ben and I had the same relationship that my father and his mother had. It was a generational fucking cycle. Gladys loved my dad so much that she drank herself to death worrying about him. Ben didn’t stand a fucking chance.”
Keough said that in the book, Lisa Marie explained why she decided to preserve her late son’s body on dry ice at her Los Angeles mansion for two months until it was ready for burial.
“I think that the plan was to bury him here with her dad, and we weren’t going to come [to Graceland] for about three weeks,” said Keough, who added that her brother would be kept at the funeral home during that time. “I think she just didn’t like the idea that he was far away,” the actress said in reference to Lisa Marie. “She didn’t know what was being done, and I think that she just wanted control over the situation given our family … and also just being a mother.”
Keough said that Lisa Marie felt comforted when she sat by her brother’s body. The Daisy Jones & The Six star also shared that during her mother’s grieving process, Lisa Marie expressed her wish to get a matching tattoo with her son on her hand — the same place where he had his tattoo.
“I think that the story could, on paper, I can see how this sounds completely insane and absurd. But I — my mom was just very much herself,” Keough said. “She wasn’t a crazy lady.”
Keough said that her mother invited a tattoo artist to view Benjamin’s body in order to get the placement right. “[The tattoo artist]God bless him, was very normal about the whole thing,” Keough said. “It definitely one of the most, like, absurd moments.”
When the artist left, Keough said she told her mother, “Do you know how fucking crazy that was, what you just did?”
Lisa Marie died on Jan. 12, 2023 after suffering cardiac arrest at her home in Calabasas, California. She was buried at Graceland next to Benjamin. Several months before she was laid to rest, Lisa Marie wrote a candid essay for People about feeling “destroyed” after her son’s death.
“Death is part of life whether we like it or not — and so is grieving. There is so much to learn and understand on the subject, but here’s what I know so far: One is that grief does not stop or go away in any sense, a year, or years after the loss,” Presley wrote. “Grief is something you will have to carry with you for the rest of your life, in spite of what certain people or our culture wants us to believe.”
