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Post by Graveyardbride on Nov 16, 2024 13:52:26 GMT -5
Lisa Marie Kept Benjamin Keough’s Corpse at Home for Two Months
Following the suicide of her 27-year-old son, Benjamin Keough, in the early morning hours of July 12, 2020, Lisa Marie Presley was so paralyzed by grief that she demanded his corpse be packed in dry ice and kept at home. (His official cause of death was listed as an “intraoral shotgun wound,” i.e, he placed the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.)
In her recent book, From Here to the Great Unknown, Riley Keough, Benjamin’s older sister, wrote that her mother died of a broken heart. (The official cause of Lisa Marie Presley’s death on January 12, 2023, was a bowel obstruction caused by adhesions from weight-loss surgery she had undergone several years previous.)
“My mom had my brother in the house with us instead of keeping him at the morgue,” his sibling revealed. “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.” She emphasized it was important to her mother to be able to properly say goodbye to her only son, “the same way she’d done with her dad.”
Before her death, Lisa Marie had begun working on her memoir, wherein she explained, “My house has a separate casita 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 [the funeral director] said, ‘We’ll bring Ben Ben to you. You can have him there.’” Presumably, he was lain out at home in the same designer suit he had worn at his funeral held July 27, 2020. The temperature in the room where Keough’s body lay was kept at a constant 55 degrees.
“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,” his mother wrote. “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.”
While their loved one was on ice, both Riley Keough and her mother had a tattoo artist come in to replicate one of Benjamin’s tattoos and when he asked if they had a photo or drawing of the image they wanted him to copy, Lisa Marie said, “No, but I can show you.” According to Riley Keough, her mother “had just asked this poor man to look at the body of her dead son, which happened to be right next to us in the casitas. I’ve had an extremely absurd life, but this moment is in the top five.”
Finally, one of Riley Keough’s younger sisters made it clear to their mother that she did not want the body in the house. Riley then channeled her dead sibling’s spirit and came to the conclusion that if he observed what was going on, he would say, “Guys, this is getting weird.” Eventually, even Lisa Marie claimed she could feel him talking to her saying, “This is insane, Mom, what are you doing? What the fuck?!”
In the book, Riley also tells how she placed a pair of yellow Nikes her brother had always loved in his casket.
Both Benjamin Keough and Lisa Marie Presley are buried in the Meditation Garden at Graceland.Sources: Gil Kaufman, Billboard, October 9, 2024; Brianne Tracy, People, October 8, 2024, and "Latest Additions to the '27 Club,'" WhatLiesBeyond, July 23, 2023.
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Post by catherine on Nov 16, 2024 22:15:53 GMT -5
I'd say Riley Keough is as unbalanced as her mother was because she obviously didn't try to discourage what she was doing.
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Post by pat on Nov 17, 2024 1:38:05 GMT -5
I can understand why someone with a terminal disease wanting to avoid a very long and painful death would chose to take their own life. But this man was only 27 years old and in good health, and he should have known what it would do to his mother if he killed himself. I sometimes wonder though if anyone who chooses suicide thinks about what it's going to do to those they leave behind.
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Post by serena on Nov 17, 2024 11:21:58 GMT -5
When someone puts a shotgun in their mouth, it just about blows their head off. The undertakers would have had to do a lot of work to make him look anything close to normal.
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Post by steve on Nov 19, 2024 15:56:22 GMT -5
When someone puts a shotgun in their mouth, it just about blows their head off. The undertakers would have had to do a lot of work to make him look anything close to normal. I knew a guy who put a shotgun in his mouth and blew half of his head off, but when we saw him at the funeral home, unless you got up really close, it was hard to tell. Later on, one of his friends said that the morticians used something like potting clay to fill in the holes, covered it over with some kind of wax, then used makeup matching his skin tone. They also glued pieces of the scalp that still had hair attached to the side of his head that had been blown away. |
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Post by aprillynn93 on Nov 19, 2024 19:04:58 GMT -5
When someone puts a shotgun in their mouth, it just about blows their head off. The undertakers would have had to do a lot of work to make him look anything close to normal. I knew a guy who put a shotgun in his mouth and blew half of his head off, but when we saw him at the funeral home, unless you got up really close, it was hard to tell. Later on, one of his friends said that the morticians used something like potting clay to fill in the holes, covered it over with some kind of wax, then used makeup matching his skin tone. They also glued pieces of the scalp that still had hair attached to the side of his head that had been blown away. My dad was killed in an automobile accident. The morticians did a terrible job. He wasn't even disfigured too much, but the finished product did not look anywhere near what he looked like in life. He looked like a manikin with a bad, painted-on makeup job. My step-mother had asked them to not put any makeup on him at all, but they did it anyway. I personally was kind of glad for that. I just thought that what he looked like was just the best they can do. Reading this however, if they can make a shot gun victim look nearly normal, then we got screwed. |
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Post by jason on Nov 20, 2024 9:34:38 GMT -5
My dad was killed in an automobile accident. The morticians did a terrible job. He wasn't even disfigured too much, but the finished product did not look anywhere near what he looked like in life. He looked like a manikin with a bad, painted-on makeup job. My step-mother had asked them to not put any makeup on him at all, but they did it anyway. I personally was kind of glad for that. I just thought that what he looked like was just the best they can do. Reading this however, if they can make a shot gun victim look nearly normal, then we got screwed. I've no doubt the funeral home employees preparing Benjamin Keough for the viewing took extra care to make him appear as life-like as possible, however, a dead person will always look dead. The objective of the funeral director is to make a corpse appear presentable for the duration of the funeral, not alive. No matter how skilled the person preparing the body might be, if you take a close look at the deceased, he or she still looks like a corpse. |
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Post by aprillynn93 on Nov 20, 2024 17:59:27 GMT -5
My dad was killed in an automobile accident. The morticians did a terrible job. He wasn't even disfigured too much, but the finished product did not look anywhere near what he looked like in life. He looked like a manikin with a bad, painted-on makeup job. My step-mother had asked them to not put any makeup on him at all, but they did it anyway. I personally was kind of glad for that. I just thought that what he looked like was just the best they can do. Reading this however, if they can make a shot gun victim look nearly normal, then we got screwed. I've no doubt the funeral home employees preparing Benjamin Keough for the viewing took extra care to make him appear as life-like as possible, however, a dead person will always look dead. The objective of the funeral director is to make a corpse appear presentable for the duration of the funeral, not alive. No matter how skilled the person preparing the body might be, if you take a close look at the deceased, he or she still looks like a corpse. Oh ok. Then maybe that actually was just the way it is done. It was the first open casket funeral I had attended. Perhaps my expectation was not in line with reality. |
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