Following the demise of Lisa Marie Presley‘s son Benjamin Keough by suicide in 2020, the singer and solely baby of Elvis Presley struggled to course of her son’s demise.
“I simply couldn’t think about a world the place she would make it with out him,” Presley’s granddaughter Riley Keough instructed Oprah Winfrey throughout a CBS particular, “The Presleys — Elvis, Lisa Marie and Riley,” on Tuesday.
Keough opened up about her mom’s posthumous memoir, From Right here to the Nice Unknown, which she co-wrote, and her household’s time at Graceland in Memphis, the place Lisa Marie stayed for a part of her childhood. Following her brother’s demise, Keough stated that her mom would say, “I’m going to die of a damaged coronary heart.”
In the course of the interview, Winfrey recalled Lisa Marie telling her that she didn’t know if she might proceed after her son’s suicide. “I knew this was the tip of her. You understand?” Keough stated. “I believe I felt grateful, as a result of I felt like I used to be on borrowed time.”
Winfrey additionally requested Keough to learn a passage from the memoir, by which her mom wrote: “Ben was similar to his grandfather, very, very, very, and in each manner. He even regarded like him. Ben was a lot like him, it scared me. I didn’t wish to inform him as a result of I assumed it was an excessive amount of to placed on a child. We have been very shut. He’d inform me all the pieces. Ben and I had the identical relationship that my father and his mom had. It was a generational fucking cycle. Gladys liked my dad a lot that she drank herself to demise worrying about him. Ben didn’t stand a fucking likelihood.”
Keough stated that within the e book, Lisa Marie defined why she determined to protect her late son’s physique on dry ice at her Los Angeles mansion for 2 months till it was prepared for burial.
“I believe that the plan was to bury him right here along with her dad, and we weren’t going to return [to Graceland] for about three weeks,” stated Keough, who added that her brother can be saved on the funeral residence throughout that point. “I believe she simply didn’t like the concept he was far-off,” the actress stated in reference to Lisa Marie. “She didn’t know what was being completed, and I believe that she simply wished management over the state of affairs given our household … and in addition simply being a mom.”
Keough stated that Lisa Marie felt comforted when she sat by her brother’s physique. The Daisy Jones & The Six star additionally shared that in her mom’s grieving course of, Lisa Marie expressed her want to get an identical tattoo along with her son on her hand — the identical place the place he had his tattoo.
“I believe that the story might, on paper, I can see how this sounds fully insane and absurd. However I — my mother was simply very a lot herself,” Keough stated. “She wasn’t a loopy woman.”
Keough stated that her mom invited a tattoo artist to view Benjamin’s physique in an effort to get the position proper. “[The tattoo artist], God bless him, was very regular about the entire thing,” Keough stated. “It undoubtedly one of the, like, absurd moments.”
When the artist left, Keough stated she instructed her mom, “Have you learnt how fucking loopy that was, what you simply did?”
Lisa Marie died on Jan. 12, 2023 after struggling cardiac arrest at her residence in Calabasas, California. She was buried at Graceland subsequent to Benjamin. A number of months earlier than she was laid to relaxation, Lisa Marie wrote a candid essay for Folks about feeling “destroyed” after her son’s demise.
“Dying is a part of life whether or not we prefer it or not — and so is grieving. There may be a lot to study and perceive on the topic, however right here’s what I do know up to now: One is that grief doesn’t cease or go away in any sense, a yr, or years after the loss,” Presley wrote. “Grief is one thing you’ll have to carry with you for the remainder of your life, despite what sure folks or our tradition desires us to consider.”