When Elvis Presley died on August 16, 1977, it came as a shock to the world. Thousands of fans gathered outside of Graceland to pay tribute to the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, with everyone mourning the loss in their own personal way. Lisa Marie Presley, his only child, was home when her father passed away, and her new memoir reveals never-before-heard details about what happened on that dreadful day.
The book also reveals how Elvis’ passing informed his daughter’s actions when dealing with the untimely death of her son, Benjamin “Ben” Keough.
Lisa Marie Presley reveals new details about her father’s death
Lisa Marie Presley‘s posthumously released memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, reveals new details about her father’s death at Graceland. She was just nine years old when Elvis Presley passed, but she remembered the day clearly.
“I ran to him, but somebody grabbed me, pulled me back. They were trying to work on him,” she wrote. “I was screaming bloody murder. I knew it was not good.”
Presley wrote that, at the time, she could hear her paternal grandfather “wailing, wailing” – a sound she’d never forget. “That noise. I’ll never get past that sound of him wailing. I could hear, ‘Oh he’s gone. He’s gone.'”
In the book, Presley explained how she, even at such a young age, was concerned for her father. “I was always worried about my dad dying,” she explained. “Sometimes I’d see him and he was out of it. Sometimes I would find him passed out. I wrote a poem with the line, ‘I hope my daddy doesn’t die.'”
She described the day Elvis died as the day “my life as I knew it is completely over.”
Riley Keough speaks about Lisa Marie Presley’s lifelong grief
Lisa Marie Presley’s daughter, Riley Keough, helped complete the memoir, and she recently spoke to Oprah Winfrey about her mother’s difficulties in coming to terms with her father’s death.
“Her grief was very… I don’t think she knew how to process it,” Keough explained. “It was a very private thing for her. She would listen to his music alone, if she was drunk, and cry […] I would walk in her room and she had speakers – because this was back in the day – and she would be sitting on the floor crying and she’d listen to her dad’s music.”
Sadly, Elvis’ death wasn’t the only tragedy that befell Presley. Her son, Benjamin Keough, took his own life in 2020, at just 27 years old.
Preserving Benjamin Keough’s body for months after his passing
When Benjamin Keough died, Lisa Marie Presley did something abnormal. Instead of immediately laying him to rest, she kept his body on dry ice at her Malibu, California, home for more than eight weeks. “There is no law in the state of California that you have to bury someone immediately,” she explained in the memoir.
To ensure Keough’s body was properly preserved for that extended period of time, she enlisted the help of a funeral home owner.
As it turns out, the same had been done for Elvis Presley, and she found it powerful in guiding her through her grief. “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,” she wrote. By doing the same with Keough, it helped Presley decide when and where to bury him.
“That was part of why it took so long,” she revealed. “I got so used to him, caring for him and keeping him there.”
Ultimately, Presley decided to bury Benjamin in Graceland, just like her father, explaining in the book, “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. I think it would scare the living f*****g piss out of anybody else to have their son there like that. But not me.”
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Sadly, Presley joined her father and son at Graceland after passing away on January 12, 2023, at just 45 years old.