Death is always an inconvenience. Not so much for the deceased; for trust me, corpses don't care. But for those who are left with the problem of disposal; be these grieving relatives, or fastidious killers hoping to cover up all traces of their victim and their crime.
Fortunately, there are several long-accepted methods of disposal; including the top two, burial and burning. But even these ancient methods present problems. In the case of cremation, for example, there's the question of what to do with the ashes; stick 'em in a ghastly urn and put granny on the mantelpiece, or scatter them to the four winds and risk the unpleasant humiliation of having them blow back in one's face.
The English novelist D. H. Lawrence was famously first buried in Vence, where he died in 1930, and then, five years later, exhumed and cremated on Frieda's orders by her Italian lover and third husband to be, Angelo Ravagli.
As to what happened to Lawrence's ashes, this has become subject to confusion and controversy. Ravagli was supposed to transport them to the ranch in New Mexico, where a suitable shrine had been built. Frieda had even provided a lovely little vase. But it seems likely that Ravagli simply threw them away (possibly into the harbour at Marseilles) and then filled the urn with a handful of dust upon his return to America.
Frieda never knew. As far as she was concerned, she'd brought Lawrence back to the place they'd been happiest and sealed his fate by mixing his ashes into a concrete block in order to prevent anyone from stealing them and, symbolically, to prevent him from wandering in death without her.
Lawrence's biographer, John Worthen, suggests that Ravagli did Lawrence a favour by rescuing him from his wife's posthumous plans:
"Lawrence may finally have managed to evade her ... and to finish his career solitary, free, unhoused, with no lid sealing him down or block containing him: scattered, perhaps into the estranging sea he had so often contemplated."
John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, (Allen Lane / Penguin Books, 2005), p. 418.
