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When Grace Seidel dies, she’s not goingto be buried in a cemetery. She won’t be crematedeither. In fact, none of the usual options have ever really felt right to her,she says.
格蕾丝·赛德尔（Grace Seidel）去世时，她不会被葬在公墓里，也不会被火化。事实上，她觉得任何一种目前通行的办法都似乎不太对她的路子。
“When you think about cremation, even when you’re dead itfeels so violent to be burned in this oven. With burial you’re filledwith chemicals and put in several boxes in the ground and I always knew I didn’t want to dothat.”
“当你想到火化，即便人已死，在燃炉中被烧掉仍然是一种暴力的方法。而土葬则需要在你体内填充各种化学物质，然后放入箱子埋在地下，我一直很确定我不想这样被安葬。”
But recently, Seidel found what she waslooking for –a process that is gentle, natural and environmentally friendly.Seidel’s body will be composted when she dies.
而最近，赛德尔找到了她所期望的办法——这个过程是温和的，即天然又环保。在她去世后，赛德尔的遗体将被自然分解。
Seidel, a 55-year-old writer and artistliving in Seattle, says she’s long been interested in death, and when hermother moved into elderly care it became hard to escape the question of whathappens to a person’s body after they pass away. “You’re constantly being facedwith the dying,”she says, “so it’s hard not to think about it. I’ve thought about ita lot in the last couple of years.”
现年55岁，生活在西雅图的赛德尔是一名作家和艺术家。她一直对死亡感兴趣，而当她的母亲搬到养老院之后这个问题就更加难以回避，当一个人死亡后遗体将被如何处理呢？她说：“你一直都在面临死亡这个问题，因此很难不去想它。在过去的几年里，我一直在考虑这个问题。”
Seidel first learned about the idea in abook called Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by the mortician Caitlin Doughty. In thebook, Doughty talks about the Urban Death Project, a space for compostingbodies. “I immediately said to myself ‘Yes! That’s for me! That would be theway to go.’”So she contacted Katrina Spade, the designer behind the project.
化作春泥更护花赛德尔起初在入殓师凯特林·道蒂（Caitlin Doughty）撰写的《你眼中的迷雾》（Smoke Gets in Your Eyes）这本书中了解到了这个办法。在书中，道蒂谈及了一个“城市逝者计划”（Urban Death Project），一个分解尸体的空间。“我立刻对自己说，”是的！我喜欢！这就是我要做的事情。“因此她立即联系了该项目的设计师卡特丽娜·斯佩德（Katrina Spade）。
Like Seidel, Spade was prompted to thinkabout death because of her family. “I had one of those epiphanies that I thinkmost people have: ‘Oh my God, I’m going to die some day.’ I had some youngkids, and something about having kids makes you feel really mortal, and theygrow so fast and you think oh my God, time is flying by.” So Spade started thinkingabout what she would want done with her own body when she died, and realisedshe wasn’t sure. She wasn’t religious, had no ties to a specific cultural ritual,and the more she looked into the funeral industry the less she liked any of theoptions.
和赛德尔一样，斯佩德也是因为家庭原因而开始思考死亡问题。“就像大多数人一样，我也有这样的顿悟：‘上帝啊，我有一天也会面临死亡’。我的孩子还小，有了孩子让你感觉真实的存在世上，他们成长得这么快，然后你会想，时光不等人啊。”当斯佩德开始思考死后要如何处理她自己的身体时，她才意识到其实自己并不是很确定。她不信宗教，也不适用于任何一个特定的文化习俗，对殡葬业了解的越多，她就越对自己所面临的选择感到无奈。
Ultimately, she came up with the UrbanDeath Project, a composting system that turns bodies into rich soil that can goback to loved ones and the community. The Urban Death Project isn’t yet areality; it’s still in the planning stages. But Spade says she’s already hadpeople, like Seidel, express interest and ask to sign up, and she hopes to getthe project up and running in the coming years.
最终，她提出了一个“城市逝者计划”，一个通过堆肥法将遗体转化可以用于丰富的肥料，成为他们曾经热爱的家人和生活的社区的一部分的堆肥系统。“城市逝者计划”目前尚未成形，仍处于规划阶段。但斯佩德说已经有像赛德尔这样的人，表达了参与的意愿，因此她希望在未来几年可以推动这个项目启动和运行。
Spade says she doesn’t want to stop anybodyfrom being buried or cremated, if that’s what they want to do. But she saysthat composting provides a method that is both environmentally friendly, andmeaningful in a way that other methods might not be for some people. “Honestly Ithink what the system is providing is really simple but very deep meaning –when youdie you can grow new life. It’s as simple as that.”
斯佩德说她不想阻碍人们采用火葬或土葬的方法，如果那是他们希望的。但她说，堆肥法提供了一种既环保又饱含深意的方式，对于一些人说使用其他方式或难达到同样的效果。“坦白说，我认为这个系统所提供的非常简单，但是很有深意：你死后新的生命得以萌发。这就是生命的轮回。”
For Seidel, that return to the earth is thekey. “I’m a gardener, I love gardening, I love being outside and I love mydirt. It seemed to me to be so gentle, just a gentle way of calmly and gentlyand non-violently returning back to the earth.” Seidel says that she almostthinks of it as a strange kind of health resort. “I don’t lay in my dirt in mybackyard, I’m not that much of a weirdo, but sometimes I’ve thought about theconcept of a spa with really clean dirt,” she says. “Wouldn’t that be pleasant tobe laying in some warm sterile soil and resting in it? That’s kind ofhow I see composting –sort of like a spa experience for the dead.”
对于赛德尔来说，入土为安是核心的想法。“我喜欢做园艺，我喜欢在户外，我热爱尘土。在我看来，这是如此的温柔，就是用一个温柔的方式平静温和地，而不是暴力的入土为安。”赛德尔说她几乎认为这是一种奇特的疗养胜地。“我不会躺在我的后院土地上，我还没有那样的怪癖，但有时我想用干净泥土做一次温泉体验，”她说。“在温暖无菌的土里休息难道不是一种令人愉快的方式吗？”这就是我对堆肥法的理解，就好像是逝者的一个温泉体验。”
