She made the confession in her posthumous memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, which was released on Tuesday, almost two years after she died in January 2023. She was 54.
In the book, completed by Lisa Marie's actress daughter Riley Keough, the singer explained that she couldn't decide whether to bury her son in Hawaii or at her late father Elvis Presley's Graceland estate in Memphis.
"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," she wrote, according to Page Six. "I found a very empathetic funeral home owner... She said, 'We'll bring Ben Ben to you.'"
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.
In her posthumous memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, the singer and only child of Elvis opened up about her fears for her father's health.
Using tapes the singer-songwriter recorded, From Here to the Great Unknown was released this week, with one chapter seeing her recall music icon Elvis's death at the age of 42 in August 1977.
"I ran to him, but somebody grabbed me, pulled me back. They were trying to work on him," she writes. "I was screaming bloody murder. I knew it was not good."
Lisa Marie also recounted how she could hear her paternal grandfather "wailing".
"That noise. I'll never get past that sound of him wailing. I could hear, 'Oh he's gone. He's gone,'" the singer continues, noting that she realised "my life as I knew it (was) completely over".
"I was always worried about my dad dying," Lisa Marie wrote in an extract obtained by People. "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.'"
"Going to his shows was my favorite thing in the world," she shared. "I was so proud of him. He would take me by the hand and bring me out onstage, then get walked to wherever his place was on the stage, and I would be taken from him and brought to wherever I was going to be sitting in the audience."
Lisa Marie went on to recall the "electricity" of the Jailhouse Rock singer's concerts.
"There's nothing I've felt that's been even close to that feeling, ever," she gushed. "Electrifying is such a generic word, but it really is what it felt like. I loved watching him perform."
The book, titled From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir, arrives October 15 via Random House, which said in its description of the book, “Born to an American myth and raised in the wilds of Graceland, Lisa Marie Presley was never truly understood . . . until now. Before her death in 2023, she’d been working on a raw, riveting, one-of-a-kind memoir for years, recording countless hours of breathtakingly vulnerable tape, which has finally been put on the page by her daughter, Riley Keough.”
