After death of Lisa Marie Presley’s son Benjamin Keough by suicide in 2020, the singer and only child of Elvis Presley struggled to cope with her son’s death.

“I just couldn’t imagine a world where she could make it without him,” Presley’s granddaughter Riley Keough told Oprah Winfrey on Tuesday during a CBS special, “The Presleys – Elvis, Lisa Marie and Riley.”

Keough opened up about her mother’s posthumous memoir: From here to the great unknownthat she co-wrote, and her family’s time at Graceland in Memphis, where Lisa Marie spent part of her childhood. After her brother’s death, Keough said her mother would say, “I’m going to die of a broken heart.”

During the interview, Winfrey recalled Lisa Marie telling her she didn’t know if she could continue after her son’s suicide. “I knew this was the end of her. You know?” Keough said. “I think I felt grateful because I felt like I was on borrowed time.”

Winfrey also asked Keough to read a passage from the memoir, in which her mother wrote, “Ben was very much like his grandfather, very, very, very, and in every way.” He even looked like him. Ben looked so much like him it scared me. I didn’t want to tell him because I thought it was too much to do to a child. We were very close. He would tell me everything. Ben and I had the same relationship as my father and his mother. It was a generational cycle. Gladys loved my father so much that she drank herself to death worrying about him. Ben had no chance.”

Keough said that in the book, Lisa Marie explained why she decided to keep her late son’s body on dry ice in her Los Angeles mansion for two months until it was ready for burial.

“I think the plan was to bury him here with her father, and we wouldn’t come to Graceland for about three weeks,” said Keough, who added that her brother would be held at the funeral home during that time. time. “I think she just didn’t like the idea of ​​him being far away,” the actress said, referring to Lisa Marie. “She didn’t know what was being done, and I think she just wanted to have control over the situation given our family … and also just want to be a mother.”

Keough said Lisa Marie felt comforted as she sat with her brother’s body. The Daisy Jones & The Six star also shared that during her mother’s grieving process, Lisa Marie expressed her desire to get a matching tattoo with her son on her hand — the same place he had his tattoo.

“I think the story on paper could see how this sounds completely insane and absurd. But I – my mom was just very much herself,” Keough said. “She wasn’t a crazy lady.”

Keough said her mother invited a tattoo artist to view Benjamin’s body to get the placement right. “(The tattoo artist), God bless him, was very normal about the whole thing,” Keough said. “It’s definitely one of the most absurd moments.”

As the artist left, Keough said she told her mother, “Do you know how fucking crazy that was, what you just did?”

Lisa Marie died on January 12, 2023 after suffering cardiac arrest at her home in Calabasas, California. She was buried in Graceland next to Benjamin. A few months before she was buried, Lisa Marie wrote a candid essay People about feeling “destroyed” after the death of her son.

“Death is a part of life, whether we like it or not – and so is grief. There is so much to learn and understand about this subject, but here is what I know so far: One is that grief in no way stops or goes away a year or years after the loss,” Presley wrote. “Grief is something you will have to carry with you for the rest of your life, despite what certain people or our culture would have us believe.”