With the release of Lisa Marie Presley’s posthumous memoir From Here to the Great Unknown in paperback, I thought it would be interesting to compare Lisa Marie’s with her mother Priscilla’s book Softly As I Leave You, released this year. While there’s obviously differences of perception, the contrast is sometimes quite large. Priscilla’s book would even at times appear to be direct responses to accusations made by Lisa Marie and Riley in their book.
In this installment (part one here, part two), we’re comparing recollections involving Lisa’s music career, her 4th marriage and the subject of her son Benjamin’s life and death.
TRIGGER WARNING FOR TALK OF ADDICTION, DISTURBING AND FRANK SUBJECT MATTER AND SUICIDE.
All excerpts are from each respective book and are being used for educational purposes only. I only quote relevant portions and do not include every variation of recollection. If you want the full stories, please read the books.
So let’s begin!
Lisa:
I had wanted to sing my whole life, but I just hadn’t […] I told Danny I wanted him to produce this track for me. I said to him, “I’ll either do this and it’s going to work out, or it’s going to be the biggest embarrassment of my life and we’ll just pretend like it didn’t happen.”
Danny produced “Baby I Love You” at the legendary One on One studio in L.A. (Danny had once had a job there, but he also got fired for not answering the phone—he was too busy playing bass.) […] So Danny and I started writing music together, and I made a demo tape. And then word got out somehow, and that’s when Prince, Michael Jackson, everybody started swarming in.
[…] I loved performing live, loved the instant feedback, the give-and-take with the audience. In the studio you’re often in the room by yourself, but live, I could watch people’s faces and see how my words or my music affected them. I could always see it in their faces. And then, getting to meet the fans and having them tell me what my music had done for them, that was really something.
Priscilla:
Call it destiny or genetics, Lisa Marie was born to be a musician. I knew it from the time she was a child […] She knew the stakes were high for her because she was Elvis’s daughter. Terrified of failure, she was afraid she would embarrass herself. If Lisa was going to be a musician, she had to find that path on her own […] By the time she was eighteen or nineteen, she was singing more often and learning to play the guitar. I think being with Danny, who was a talented musician himself, was a big part of that.
[…] I’d been waiting for that for years, waiting for her to break out. I felt like she was finally doing what she was meant to do. She was so talented.
[…] She worked with T-Bone Burnett to create what critics agreed was the best work of her career. Online music service Spinner described the album as a “moody masterpiece,” and Rolling Stone called it “the album she was born to make.” It was titled Storm and Grace […] Lisa had put her whole heart into the album, which is a small masterpiece. She put her whole heart into promoting it as well.
[…] By the time the 2012 Grammy nominations were announced, Lisa’s hopes were high. This was the best work she would ever do. The album was her heart and soul. Recognition by the music industry would be validation that she was worthy of being Elvis’s daughter. She wasn’t nominated. Lisa was devastated. Michael, Riley, and I did everything we could to comfort and reassure her, but nothing we said helped. She said she was finished. She would never write another song, and she never did. Her decision still breaks my heart.
Riley:
My mom would always sing along in the car, but in a self-conscious way, as though she didn’t want anyone to hear her. I didn’t understand back then why she was scared about music […] My parents began to record music in my mom’s garage in Florida. These would become some of the songs on her very first record. They would write during the day and at night we’d all go get frozen yogurt or go to a movie theater to see something.
[…] It was hard for my mom to have a music career. She was a beautiful lyricist, but she didn’t feel like she had real control over her music. I thought it was so brave for her to make a record at all […] My mom loved touring, but it wasn’t lucrative for her because she wasn’t giving people what they thought they wanted, which was for her to cover Elvis songs.
[After Benjamin’s Death] She thought about making more music, but she wasn’t there yet.
Rolling Stone, 2025:
In late 2021 or early 2022, [Linda] Perry, who hadn’t worked with [Lisa] since Now What, reached out again. “Things got rough with her son passing,” says Perry. “Obviously, that was difficult. I just kept texting her saying, ‘You got to come back in the studio.’” They met once to discuss what could have been Presley’s first album in a decade, then reconnected in the summer. Perry says that Presley told her she was swamped but would get back to her
[…] Around the start of 2023, Perry reminded herself to prod Presley once more. “There was an urgency to me,” she says. “I wanted her in the studio because I knew she needed to get in here and start recording, and she knew that needed to happen as well. Music is just so healing.”
Benjamin
Priscilla:
Like Lisa, Ben was sweet, sensitive, and introspective. But unlike his mother, he lacked the tough exterior that was part of Lisa’s defense mechanism against the world. He had a fragile, soulful quality about him, almost as if he were too good for this world. No wonder Lisa had an overpowering desire to protect him.
Lisa:
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.
Riley:
He never really got in trouble. All he would ever get was “Benjamin…” And if he was really in trouble, “Benjamin Storm…” […] Everyone loved him too much to stay mad at him.
[…] Another time I chased him into the laundry room, telling him I didn’t want to play with him because he was being such an annoying little brother. I remember I had a VHS cassette in my hand and I was so angry that I lifted it up high like I was going to hit him with it. He started sobbing […] I have felt bad about that for my whole life. Like I said, he could just break my heart so easily…because he was the sweetest little boy you could imagine.
Lisa and Benjamin’s Bond
Priscilla:
In so many ways, Lisa embodied Elvis’s legacy from the day she was born. Part of it was physical. She looked strikingly like her father, and she inherited his physical propensity to addiction as well. She was passionate and moody like her father; she was also charismatic and mercurial. Her musical talent was, I believe, genetic. So was her tendency toward depression and her deep need to find meaning in life. Elvis was a searcher, and though Lisa never duplicated the religious explorations her father made, she pondered the meaning of life from her earliest years […] I believe she also inherited the capacity for intense parental connection like that between Elvis and his mother. Theirs went beyond the typical parent-child bond.
Lisa loved all her children passionately, but it was Ben she had the intense bond with. Like Gladys had been to Elvis, Lisa was connected to Ben’s soul. The trauma of losing Elvis had permanently marked Lisa’s life, so when she gave birth to a son who looked strikingly like her father, it was like a gift from heaven. It was as though she got a part of Elvis back again in her son. She watched over Ben just as Gladys had watched over Elvis, keeping him safe. Ben had the same intense blue eyes, and his fair coloring was like Elvis’s as a child. [.. ] If you place photos of Elvis and Ben as children side by side, the resemblance is unmistakable.
One time when I was at Graceland with Lisa and Ben, we saw a portrait of Elvis in the archives […] Lisa pointed to the picture and said to Ben, “See there? Look at you. You look like my dad.” Then she pointed from the picture to Ben’s face and said, “See?”
Ben just mumbled and said, “Yeah.”
[…] One thing was certain: She adored her son. She used to joke with Riley that Ben was her favorite, but Riley took it good-naturedly. She knew she was loved, too.
Lisa:
[After his death] My son made me go to Hawaii. I did not want to go. We had a house there, I’d lived there, he loved it there, it was his favorite place. He knew that’s where I used to go to heal.
Suddenly I found myself planning a trip there, and I said out loud to him, “Okay, this is not me, but I’m going. It’s you. I know it’s you. I know you know I don’t want to go, but I’m going.” Then I was there on the actual anniversary of his death. It was not a coincidence, I knew not to invalidate that.
Riley:
I had an instinct that Ben was the love of my mom’s life […] Ben had curly ringlets down to his butt, and a lot of people thought he was a girl. He loved being in nature, a little nature boy, and he was sweet, soft, and gentle, an old soul.
Just as Elvis had with his mother, and my mom had with Elvis, my brother and my mom had a kind of “I can’t live without you” relationship. They shared a very deep soul bond.
[…] We’d send each other links to houses on Redfin that he might one day buy. His dream was to live a simple life somewhere—Hawaii or Japan were his top choices.
But when the conversation would progress, he’d always hit his reality: “I can’t leave Mom.”
He, like the rest of us siblings, was privy to the tremendously deep sadness and loneliness of her. How she had ended up pushing away virtually everyone and everything she loved and was very much alone. And he’d given himself the responsibility of never leaving her side.
Lisa’s 4th Marriage to Michael Lockwood
Priscilla:
That same year, Lisa Marie married again, this time to her music producer and guitarist, Michael Lockwood. She met Michael shortly after she completed her first album. He became lead guitarist and producer for Now What. By 2005, they were spending most of their time together working on the album. They became close friends and soon fell in love. [.. ] Even I had taken my time falling in love with Elvis, despite his legendary charm. Lisa and Michael were joined at the hip musically well before they married.
I met Michael after one of Lisa’s concerts in Nashville, about a year after her divorce from Nick. He was playing guitar in her band. When I went backstage after the concert, Lisa introduced us. It was apparent that she was falling in love with him. She raved about how great he was and told me she really, really liked him. Liking him was a good sign. It implied respect and friendship and not just attraction. I liked him immediately. Michael is a very nice man, a patient man who cared about my daughter. They waited threeThey waited three years before marrying, another good sign.
[…] I had the honor of walking her down the aisle and giving her away. I fervently hoped this was the last wedding she would ever have.
Lisa Marie was still young, still hoping she’d found true love. I myself no longer hoped for that. There were many reasons, including the fact that I had not always made good choices. Like my daughter, I had been a target of flattery and greed for many years, from both men and women, because I was Priscilla Presley, with all that this name entailed in the public perception. People gravitated to me for many reasons, including money. I think of my house as home, but for some, it was desirable real estate, a chance for free rent.
Riley:
My mother desperately wanted a normal life, and Michael Lockwood felt like her last shot at it. It seemed that in Michael she felt she’d found a person who could help her stop running from stability.
[…] At the rehearsal dinner I remember my mom motioning for me to go outside with her. We set off along a beautiful old tiny road […] During the walk my mom said, “I’m having a panic attack in there—I don’t know why….” We walked a little farther and she said, “I felt stuck at that table. I needed to go outside.” I was just sixteen at the time, and not sure what was going on, though I figured maybe she was afraid of commitment. Maybe she knew somewhere in her that this was the beginning of the last chapter.
The Twins’ Birth
Riley:
During her pregnancy with my sisters, she rented a house in Montecito as the first chapter of a sort of fairy-tale life she wanted to create for herself with her new babies. She was away from L.A., it was a beautiful summer, and we would spend these gorgeous days enjoying her being pregnant in her peaceful garden.
My mom could strongly sense, in a deeply spiritual way, who these two beings inside her were. She felt that Harper would be delicate and feminine and strong, Finley sassy and stubborn and sweet. And she was right. That’s who they are […] My mother was like a hurricane. Yet everyone notices how sweet and gentle her kids are.
In October 2008 she gave birth to twin daughters, my dear sisters, Harper Vivienne Ann Lockwood, named after Michael’s mother and Priscilla, and Finley Aaron Love Lockwood, named after Gladys and Elvis. Harper and Finley were just the sweetest little babies. They were born via C-section at Los Robles Hospital, in Thousand Oaks.
I, along with Michael Lockwood, was present when my mom had her C-section. When they came out, I remember thinking that they looked just how we thought they would. Both of them had the Cupid bow lips and heavy eyelids we all have.
I was nineteen, and they felt like my babies, too.
Priscilla:
On October 7, 2008, I was blessed with another grandchild— twice blessed, in fact. Lisa gave birth to twin girls. It had been a long road for Lisa.
[…] On the morning of the seventh, Lisa called me to say she was in labor. She said, “It’s time, Mom.” I told her I would meet her at the hospital as soon as I could. The drive to Los Robles Hospital in Thousand Oaks took about forty-five minutes, and by the time I got there, Lisa was on the table. I was a nervous wreck. She was clearly in a lot of pain. She told me, “I want you with me, Mommy,” and I reassured her I’d stay with her. Michael was there, with Riley and Ben, all of us awaiting the big moment.
Danny and Lisa’s Continued Attachment After Divorce
Riley:
Crazy stuff continued. There were further attempts to poison the well with my dad, for example—people close to my grandmother told my mom that Danny had been selling my mom out to the press.
To prove it, they put a PI on my dad for months. At one point he was playing blackjack for money in Vegas and the PI followed him there. Then, my dad got a call from two of his friends, Cyndi Lauper and Angela McCluskey, to go meet them at Sundance […] the PI still managed to lose him and told my mom that they had no idea where he was.
“He’s stolen a car and done a runner,” the PI said.
At Sundance, my dad met up with Cyndi and Angela and they all went to a party for the French band Air. And who did Danny find at the party? My mother, her boyfriend, and her head of security.
“Hi!” Danny said when he saw my mom.
My mom’s jaw dropped. Her PI had lost my dad, but he had found my mom, like he always did.
[…] As I’ve said, my mom always wanted birthdays and holidays to be a big deal, so for my sixteenth birthday celebration a large group of us went to Hawaii: me and six of my closest friends, Ben and two of his friends, my mom and some of her friends, her future husband Michael Lockwood, and my dad […] The night continued like so many others: My mom and dad dancing together, laughing in their own world. They always felt like a pair of pirates to me.
Priscilla:
On January 22, 2006, [Lisa and Lockwood] got married in a traditional Japanese ceremony in Kyoto, Japan. It was a small, private service […] Danny, Lisa’s first husband and still best friend, was Michael’s best man.
Benjamin’s Struggles
Priscilla:
I had spent all of Lisa’s childhood and teen years trying to protect her from the implications of being Elvis Presley’s daughter. I saw history being repeated with Ben. And emotionally, being frequently perceived in relation to Elvis, rather than as themselves, was confusing for both of them. Who did people see when they looked at Ben and Lisa? Who did people like, Lisa and Ben or Elvis’s daughter and grandson?
[…] Just as Gladys had overprotected Elvis out of love and fear, Lisa overprotected Ben […] Her intense protectiveness made him very uncomfortable. I will admit , though, that my daughter learned that habit partly from me.
[…] And of course, she indulged him, as Elvis had indulged her. As she indulged all her children. For Lisa, Elvis’s permissiveness was a sign of unconditional love.
Lisa:
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. And then my dad had his demons and acted out on them. I have everything in me that wants to do the same thing. And then my son’s got the same genetic makeup—I feel like he’s more genetically me than Danny.
Ben didn’t stand a fucking chance.
Riley:
My mother was slowly falling apart. My brother was, too.
[…] We were all drinking a lot, but even when he drank, my brother remained jovial, fun. He was somebody who never wanted the night to end, the last person awake.
But there was one night at a club when I was around twenty-two and Ben started pushing me to leave. It didn’t feel right. He got me in a taxi and sent me back to the hotel where we were staying for the weekend. Only later did I realize he’d been doing drugs—probably Molly or coke—and he had wanted me out of there so he could do whatever he wanted without me finding out.
This became a theme in my family: They would do things behind my back. I was kind of the narc—my mom always said I was too harsh on Ben or too harsh on her, but I think it was simply that I was the only one who wasn’t an addict—so I was the downer. But I was getting concerned about Ben.
Ben Ben was a mama’s boy through and through, and he couldn’t handle his mama being in pain. They were so close—like Elvis and Gladys—one inextricably tied to the rise and fall of the other, and seeing each other in pain was impossibly hard for them. It wrecked him. What had once felt like a perfect childhood to us gave way to what felt like a nightmare to him. Like many in our family, substances were where Ben found relief, and his alcohol addiction got worse.
Benjamin’s Death [TRIGGER WARNING]
Lisa:
When I was thirteen, I had a best friend at school named Brian. One day, I remember coming to school, and everybody was being weird. They called us into a room and told us that Brian had died from sniffing glue. We were freaking out, so they took us for a walk to get our attention outward.
But they had lied to us. I remember saying to a teacher on that walk, “How did he really do it?”
The teacher said, “He shot himself.”
People have misconceptions about suicide. I always thought if someone is talking about it, they won’t do it.
Nearly five months before her death on Jan. 12 at 54, Lisa Marie Presley shared exclusively with PEOPLE an essay she wrote about navigating grief following the heartbreaking death of her son Benjamin Keough in 2020. This essay was first published on Aug. 30, 2022:
I’ve dealt with death, grief and loss since the age of 9 years old. I’ve had more than anyone’s fair share of it in my lifetime and somehow, I’ve made it this far. But this one, the death of my beautiful, beautiful son? The sweetest and most incredible being that I have ever had the privilege of knowing, who made me feel so honored every single day to be his mother?
Who was so much like his grandfather on so many levels that he actually scared me? Which made me worry about him even more than I naturally would have? No. Just no … no no no no …
Riley:
It was five-thirty a.m., July 12, 2020. My phone was ringing. Half awake, startled, I said to my husband, “Christy’s calling me, something’s wrong.” If my mom’s assistant was calling me that early, it had to be serious. Oh God, something happened to my mom, I thought.
[…] My heart started beating so hard I could feel the blood in my ears, and I picked up.
“Your brother shot himself in the head! Your brother shot himself in the head!” Christy kept saying, over and over.
I could not take it in. I could hear her saying it, but I could not absorb the words, the finality of that statement. I was suddenly filled with the most profoundly painful thought: This is real and there’s nothing I can do.
Time started to stretch, or quicken, I couldn’t tell, but my next thought was that I was about to have to tell my mom that the second man she loved the most in the world was gone.
[…]The door opened, she was half asleep. “What’s going on?” she said.
I took a breath. “Ben Ben shot himself in the head,” I said. I tried to say it calmly.
She didn’t understand what I had said. Nothing registered on her face. I said it again. Nothing. We just kind of looked at each other. Then she started grabbing her things and said, “I need to go to him now.”
[…] It was too painful to cry. I distinctly remember thinking, I’ve never seen this in a movie, when someone dies, how it’s too painful to cry. And when you do eventually cry, it’s a different cry. It feels like something deeper than your emotions is crying out, and it feels like it’s never going to end. Some kind of a terrifying, bottomless pain.
[…] His face was perfectly intact, beautiful somehow. He had bruises under his eyes and what looked like wine stains on his mouth. He had this little smile on his face. My mom grabbed his head. “What did you do, Benjamin? What did you do?” she said, as though he could hear her.
That was the first time she cried.
She had blood all over her hands from holding the back of his head. Then she had blood all over her face. She kissed his forehead and held her face to his and cried.
I was in shock. I left my body entirely. I think I was crying but I don’t know. I felt like I was being piloted by some other force. I was afraid to touch him. I put my hand on the body bag around his chest. I wish that I’d hugged him right there, one more time.
They zipped up the body bag and took him outside. We followed. They loaded him into the back of a car and slammed the doors. And then he was just in there and then they just drove him away. Just like that.
[…] Ben was such an angel that, to everyone, it felt wrong that he had died. Like a mistake had been made. Even people who spent a short amount of time with him knew he was a force for good. You could sense it emanating off him, like light. It felt like whoever was running this world had just made a colossal error.
[…] I didn’t know that Ben had ever thought about killing himself. I was gutted that he hadn’t shared his pain with me […] We all agreed that my brother wouldn’t have killed himself sober. We all had a sense that the minute he did it, it wasn’t truly what he wanted. And knowing that was really hard for us.\n\nI have never been angry with my brother for doing what he did. I feel a tremendous empathy for him, and a profound sadness that he felt, in that moment, that dying was his only solution.
I know in any death there’s a feeling of responsibility in the ones left behind, but with suicide, the guilt is deeper. And because he was my little brother, I feel a sense of personal responsibility, like I failed in my role as his big sister. Of course, my parents felt this even more than I did.
Priscilla:
None of us saw it coming. For twenty-seven years. Not a glimmer. It was Riley who got the first call. Lisa’s assistant was at the party, and she wanted the family to know before it hit the news. But she didn’t want to be the one to break it to Lisa. While the police were called, Riley’s phone rang at a little after five in the morning. The voice on the other end said, “Your brother’s shot himself in the head!” Lisa’s assistant said it over and over.
As the reality of the situation sank in, Riley knew she had to be the one to tell her mother. My sweet Riley, struggling to function, went directly to the hotel with her husband to wake her mother and break the news. She called her father and then called me. Danny caught the next plane to LA from Portland, where he was living at the time. I called Navarone, and I called Vikki to come take care of my dogs. And then I went to the hotel. We were all like the island of the lost, stunned into silence by pain. I didn’t even cry, not yet. All I could think about was Lisa. She would never recover from this. I didn’t see how she could outlive it.
Grief Following Benjamin’s Suicide
Lisa:
I’m still only fourteen months out. I’m not crying all day every day, or locking myself in my room all day and not coming out. I’ve made baby steps. I’m able to have a conversation and not feel like I’m losing my mind. I can think better now. For a long time, I couldn’t think at all.
How do I heal? By helping people. One kid wrote to Riley and said, “I didn’t kill myself last night because of what you said it would do to my family and those that are left behind. So thank you. I’ll find some other way.” That helped me. That brought me up.
[…] If I’m honoring my Ben Ben, and if I’m helping other people by sharing the experience I had with him, with addiction or suicide, that feels really authentic to me.
That’s where I’m at.
[…] After my father died, people always described me as sad. It was like a permanent imprint on my face after that, in my eyes […] The sadness started at nine when he passed away, and then it never left. Now it’s even worse—my eyes are downcast permanently in this grief. The view is pretty limited.
I always thought, Why does everybody always say I look sad?
And now I get it.
I don’t think my spark will ever come back, to be perfectly honest. Grief settles. It’s not something you overcome. It’s something that you live with. You adapt to it. Nothing about you is who you were. Nothing about how or what I used to think is important. The truth is that I don’t remember who I was. The other day somebody said, “I know you better than anyone,” and I said, “No, you don’t. You don’t have a fucking clue who I am. Because I don’t even know who the fuck I am anymore.”
Riley:
For two weeks I couldn’t really remember how to talk. I could understand what words were, but I couldn’t understand how to get them from my thoughts to my lips. People would talk to me, but my mouth wouldn’t work. I came to understand how people go mute through trauma.
I felt like I had also died. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t think. I saw Ben Ben’s face in everything everywhere. I couldn’t stand up for very long, so I would just lie down most of the time. I felt like I weighed a thousand pounds. A few friends would break Covid protocol and come over and give me baths and shave my legs. All I could manage to do was lie on the floor in the sun.
I was more physically incapacitated than my parents. I had always been the responsible one, in charge and taking control of pretty much everything. But I couldn’t this time.
My parents ended up doing all of the arrangements—choosing his coffin, all that. I think they needed to stay busy. I couldn’t even think about it, couldn’t hear anything about the arrangements. I remember one day I walked into a room where my mom was smoking a cigarette and looking at different coffins and I turned and walked right back out before she saw me.
I refused to let any of it in.
When Ben died, I thought it would be a matter of hours until my mother relapsed. But she surprised me and remained completely sober to honor him. She really wanted to get her life together and help others somehow. She wanted to be of service. But she was too broken.
[…] From as early as I can remember we’ve been able to ask my parents questions like, “What am I doing here, in this world?” and they have always been open to those conversations. So when Ben passed, we had this beautiful grieving experience that I don’t think people have very often. We talked about existence and loss and love and their deeper meanings. It was a singular period in which we all felt strongly that we were connecting to something bigger than ourselves. It was my parents, my sisters, my cousins, and my closest friends in a Covid and grief pod. We would take my sisters out into the backyard where we would sing and paint and lie under the stars. It was all Ben-centric, a process led by my mother who said that she wasn’t going to let us talk about anything other than her son. I’m really grateful she did that. If I hadn’t had her to set that tone, I might have listened to friends urging me to get back to work or move toward a kind of escapism to try to dampen the loss.
My mom simply said, “No, we’re experiencing this.”
[…] Sometimes, even now, I’ll be doing something, and grief’s volume is turned down so I can (just barely) function, but the rest of the time it’s cranked up all the way and I can’t hear anything. A childhood friend of mine asked me, “Does it lessen? Does it get any better?” The answer is no. Today I might be able to take a shower and not think about it, tomorrow I could be crying in the shower.
Grief is always there.
Priscilla:
One of the most difficult things about being a celebrity is sharing your grief with the public. We were deluged with requests for comment long before we had processed the news ourselves […] I coped by focusing on Lisa, Danny, and the girls. I reminded myself that they were the ones bearing the brunt of the loss. For a while, shock kept Lisa on her feet as she and Danny planned Ben’s funeral.
Riley, however, was barely coping. She stopped speaking almost completely and struggled even to bear her own weight. Her friends would half carry her to the shower to bathe and would wash her hair for her, then try to get her to eat. The twins couldn’t stop crying.
All of us kept asking ourselves why. Why had he done it? Why hadn’t he reached out to one of us? Why hadn’t we seen it coming? We were all drowning in whys. There were no family fights, no recriminations , no blaming one another. We were all isolated in our own misery. One of the hardest things for me was that Lisa wouldn’t let me comfort her […] I continued to remind myself that my own pain had to be secondary to Lisa’s grief. I walked through the days like a zombie. I can barely remember them. As had happened when Elvis died, everything became a blur for me. Even today, when I’m asked about the details of Ben’s passing, my mind goes blank.
Lisa Keeping Ben’s Body in Her Home
Lisa:
My house has a separate casitas bedroom, and I kept Ben Ben in there for two months. There is no law in the state of California that you have to bury someone immediately.
I found a very empathic funeral home owner. I told her that 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 said, “We’ll bring Ben Ben to you. You can have him there.”
“Bring him, then,” I said.
We had to keep the room at 55 degrees. I still didn’t know where I was going to bury him—Hawaii, Graceland, Hawaii, Graceland—so that was part of why it took so long. But I got so used to him, caring for him and keeping him there.
I think it would scare the living fucking piss out of anybody else to have their son there like that. But not me.
The normal process of death is: The person dies, they have an autopsy, viewing, funeral, buried, boom. It’s all over in a four- or five-day period, maybe a week if you’re lucky. But you don’t really have a chance to process it. 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.
Priscilla:
I do remember seeing Ben. Lisa had him brought home after the authorities released his body. I remember that he was lying on a table, in Lisa’s room, I think. I went into the room alone. Given the manner of his death, you would expect to find him disfigured, even unrecognizable. But he wasn’t. The back of his head was badly damaged, but his face was virtually untouched. He was still a beautiful boy. I touched his hands and stroked his face. I told him how much he was loved. I told him how much I would miss him. And I wept for all he was and all he might have been.
[…] He was kept in a coffin filled with dry ice. Lisa spent most of her time with him. She couldn’t bear to let him go. I remembered over forty years earlier, sitting on the stairs with her at Graceland, looking down on Elvis’s body while fans filed by. We would go to visit him afterward, when the house was quiet. I remembered us kissing him goodbye late that last night. Being with Elvis after death had comforted Lisa. So did being with Ben.
We all grieve in our own way.
Riley:
My mom had my brother in the house with us instead of keeping him at the morgue. They told us that if we could tend to the body, we could have him at home, so she kept him in our house for a while on dry ice. It was really important for my mom to have ample time to say goodbye to him, the same way she’d done with her dad. And I would go and sit in there with him.
[…] Soon after that, we all kind of 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 fuck!”
Benjamin’s Funeral
Riley:
Ben’s funeral was the most brutalizing day of my life.
The service was held in Malibu, overlooking the ocean. I think we broke some Covid rules as over a hundred people came. For the entire car ride there I was shaking so hard I thought I’d shatter or have a heart attack.
[…] The service was as beautiful as it could have been, filled with everything Ben loved […] But as beautiful as it all was, I found myself needing to close my eyes simply to be able to bear it. When I’d open them, I could barely see through tears, and what little I did see was a blurry vision of my little sisters in hysterics, gripping on to my mother for dear life. So I’d close them again.
[…] I simply was not there. I had to disassociate, and my spirit left my body again […] It was just punishing.
After that, we sent him to Memphis, to Graceland, to be buried with his grandfather.
Priscilla:
There was a private funeral in Malibu on July 27, two weeks after his death […] Lisa and Danny were able to rent a beautiful location near the ocean. About one hundred family and friends attended, all masked because of the virus. I had been seated across the aisle from Lisa, so I was grateful when Navarone arrived and sat next to me, his arm protectively around my shoulders.
[…] Riley’s husband, Ben, read a tribute of love that Riley had written for her brother. She was still so traumatized that speaking was difficult. The venue was decorated with cherry blossoms, and Ben lay in an open coffin in a separate room. He looked remarkably serene in his suit and hat. The ravages of his passing did not show on his face.
Ben’s body remained at home with Lisa for another two and a half months, until Lisa felt he no longer wanted to be there. He was taken to Graceland for a second, small family ceremony on October 1 and laid to rest in the Meditation Garden near Elvis.
Lisa’s Intense Grief For Benjamin
Priscilla:
Losing Ben was the beginning of the end for my daughter. She had lost the love of her life. For the second time. She would never get over it. We all knew that with Lisa, we were living on borrowed time.
Riley:
After Ben Ben died, I knew my mom wouldn’t survive it for very long. She did not want to be here.
When he left the casitas, she chose to live the rest of her life in mourning. She wasn’t interested in talking about anything other than my brother anymore. She would say that her life was over, that she was only here for her other children, but that she was torn, because she had three children here on earth, but one child somewhere else.
Lisa:
The real me, whoever I had been, detonated completely a year and a half ago.
I have to be okay with it and let it do its thing, let it take me over and consume me, let it ease up on me, let it step on the gas, step on the brake, step on the gas, step on the brake. I’m just driving with it.
If I look back at everything, my whole life, I can just lose it. Try, fail, try, fail, good, bad, fail. I get really overwhelmed and start crying, looking at how fucked up my life has been. Sometimes it feels like there’s nothing left, no purpose. Like there’s nothing I want to accomplish anymore. No goal, no anything. Zero. I have three remaining children, so I fight it, I fight it, I fight it, I fight it, I fight it. But it’s fucking there, alive and well. It’s a lion’s roar and I have to shut it down, shut it up. I’m surprised I’m still alive. I can’t believe I’m still standing. It feels wrong to be alive without Ben.
But then I can look at it another day and think, Okay, wait, there was But then I can look at it another day and think, Okay, wait, there was that part that wasn’t so bad. There was some good over there, and there was some fun over there. I try to pepper it with, “It’s not all just shit. I met this person, that part happened. That was good.”
Some of it was good.
Next up: The end. Lisa’s spiraling addiction, Priscilla and Lisa’s estrangement, and Lisa’s sudden death.
Sources: From Here to the Great Unknown – Lisa Marie Presley & Riley Keough (2024), Softly As I Leave You – Priscilla Presley (2025), Instagram: one, two, Lisa’s People magazine essay, The Haunted Life of Lisa Marie Presley