LONDON (Reuters) - Former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney cradled his dying wife Linda in his arms and talked her through the final stages of cancer after the disease took a sudden turn for the worse, friends said on Tuesday. The devastated singer-songwriter then had the woman who had been his soul mate for 30 years cremated in a secret ceremony and scattered her ashes over the family farm they shared in southern England. He now plans to issue a tribute album to Linda including several songs that she wrote and recorded shortly before she died. McCartney`s spokesman said Linda`s death in California on Friday was totally unexpected. She was 56 and believed she had beaten the breast cancer she had been battling for two years. The spokesman said the loss to McCartney, who had spent only one night apart from Linda since their marriage in 1969, was almost impossible to put into words. Close friend Carla Lane, a British television writer and animal rights campaigner, said Linda and Paul had been riding near their Santa Barbara home in California two days before her death. On the day she died, she was simply too tired to get out of bed. "He got into bed with her and lay with her and said everything was going to be all right. He didn`t got to sleep. He held her and talked to her through the night," Lane said. She described McCartney, whose marriage to Linda was one of the closest in show business, as "shipwrecked". Linda`s death was all the more poignant for McCartney because his mother Mary died of breast cancer when he was 14. His hit song "Let It Be" was written for her. Other family friends told how McCartney and the couple`s four grown-up children decided to have Linda cremated in a brief private ceremony in California. They then flew back to Britain on Saturday carrying the ashes in an urn and scattered them over the farm in Sussex, where the children grew up and from where Linda built up a successful vegetarian food business. The former Beatle has asked that instead of sending flowers, people should make a donation to cancer research or animal welfare charities - or simply "go veggie (vegetarian)". Paul and Linda, who played and sang together in the 1970s band Wings after the break-up of the Beatles, recorded six songs written by her earlier this year and McCartney planned to release them shortly as a tribute. The sudden nature of her death also prompted a flood of calls by anxious women to breast cancer charities. Breast cancer is the biggest cause of death amongst British women aged 35 to 54. Britain has the highest death rate in the world from breast cancer, which kills 300 women in the country each week.