Concrete Afterlife: Or How to Become Your Own Gravestone

 

The result is a unique, self-contained and virtually eternal 

concrete object that represents what the person was in life.

 

 

I. 

 

Concrete is a composite material made up of fine and coarse aggregates often bonded with cement that hardens over time into a durable stone-like substance. It is one of the most frequently used building materials in the world; we use twice more concrete (ton for ton) than we do steel, wood, or plastic combined.

 

For the Romans, who also used concrete extensively, it was a revolutionary material which allowed them to build structures that were not only more complex, but bigger and stronger than previously possible; the Colosseum is largely made of concrete and the Pantheon is sealed beneath what remains to this day the world's largest unreinforced concrete dome. 

 

It's not, as one might imagine, the kind of material likely to appeal to D. H. Lawrence; a writer who hated stone monuments intended to last for millennia and who hated Imperial Rome which "smashed nation after nation and crushed the free soul in people after people" [1]. 

 

Within his hierarchy of materials, Lawrence ranks wood way above concrete and he praises peoples like the Etruscans who built their houses and temples of the former, so that their towns and cities eventually vanished as completely as flowers: 

 

"Myself, I like to think of the little wooden temples of the early Greeks and of the Etruscans: small, dainty, fragile, and evanescent as flowers. We have reached the stage where we are weary of huge stone erections, and we begin to realise that it is better to keep life fluid and changing, than to try and hold it fast down in heavy monuments. Burdens on the face of the earth, are man's ponderous erections." [2]

      

It's the imposition of stone and concrete that Lawrence loathes; the attempt to impress with a display of wealth and power and to materially manifest the superiority of one's culture over that of one's neighbour who prefers to build in softer materials and keep things on a human scale. 

 

 

II. 

 

Now, one might have thought that Lawrence's wife, Frieda, would've been (or should've been) aware of her husband's views on this subject. Thus her decision - made five years after his death - to have his corpse exhumed and cremated, so that she might then mix the ashes into a concrete block remains puzzling and troubling [3].

 

I mean, wtf was she thinking? Lawrence would've hated the thought of a concrete overcoat. It seems, however, that some people today love the idea ...

 

Indeed, there are now businesses offering to add the cremains of your loved one to concrete and then pour the mix into a mould of your choosing. You can, for example, turn great-uncle Bertie into a concrete bird bath, or perhaps transform a hen-pecked husband into a lovely set of paving stones so that you can continue to walk all over him in death as you did in life. 

 

As Diego Belden and Arturo Acosta of project Concrete Afterlife note: 

 

"The corpse's ashes become a self-sufficient and unique statement of who he/she was in life, almost as eternal as the soul it has parted with. The flexibility of the material and process, allow this concrete avatar to blend much more easily with its surroundings. Whether it is placed among decorative items on a coffee table or shelf, stands silently in the garden, or is disguised as an odd looking rock in a remote natural location." [4]

 

Far be it from me to criticise those who want to have this done - either with their own ashes, or the ashes of a loved one - but, personally speaking, I'm not convinced. I want my remains mixed up with the wind and the rain, not confined within concrete and I have no desire to effectively become my own gravestone.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Sketches of Etruscan Places, in Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, ed. Simonetta De Filippis, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 9.  

[2] Ibid., p. 32. It might be noted that Lawrence doesn't just object to ancient monuments; he also complains of "new concrete villas [and] new concrete hotels" [p. 25] being built along the Roman coast in towns like Ladispoli.   

[3] I have written in an earlier post about the fate of Lawrence's ashes: click here.  

[4] To know more about Diego Belden's and Arturo Acosta's project - Concrete Afterlife - see the online magazine Designboom (19 April, 2013): click here. Note that the image and blurb used above is taken from here (the latter having been very slightly revised).  

Corpus Delicti (With Reference to the Case of D. H. Lawrence)

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.