Life Forest: A unique cemetery in the woods of Hillsborough
Oct. 30—HILLSBOROUGH
E ven in all her grief, Melissa LeBeau knew just what to do when her mother died unexpectedly last month.
Last weekend, on a postcard-perfect autumn day, LeBeau buried her mother's ashes beneath a newly planted rose of Sharon bush at Life Forest cemetery in Hillsborough. She and her family and friends shared stories about her mom and placed red long-stemmed carnations at the burial site.
Life Forest is a "conservation cemetery," where someone can have their cremated remains buried beneath a tree of their choice. It's the first such place in New Hampshire and may well be unique in the entire country.
It's where LeBeau's mother had insisted she be laid to rest, after close family friends were buried there two years ago.
The ceremony was completely different from any funeral she had ever attended, said LeBeau, who lives in Londonderry. "People were dressed to be outside and people were there to celebrate the life of somebody they loved," she said. "It wasn't the typical everyone's in black, everyone's head's down, everyone's crying, everyone's miserable.... None of that happened."
"It's down to earth, literally," she said.
For Life Forest co-founders Mel Bennett and John O'Neil, their work is personal, even sacred.
"I think our responsibility is twofold: protecting the land as well as protecting the legacy," Bennett said.
Life Forest bears little resemblance to a traditional cemetery. Its 13 acres are surrounded by another 86 acres of conservation land owned by the town of Hillsborough.
Deer, moose, coyote and porcupine live in these woods, and ferns and wildflowers are abundant. A pollinator garden draws butterflies and bees in the summertime, and birds eat the raspberries and blueberries that grow wild.
The burial sites are marked by trees and bushes, with small metal tags that bear the names and photos of those buried, along with a QR code that links to a site where families can share memories, photos, videos and other mementos.
The founders had to get approval from the local planning board and conservation commission, as well as the state departments of environmental services and agriculture. They worked with the state Bureau of Vital Statistics and the county Registry of Deeds to ensure Life Forest burials are properly recorded.
Bennett said families have deeded access to their burial plots that they can pass to future generations.
"It will always be there for our families to have this area of beautiful conservation land," she said. "We want to make sure our people are really protected."
Families get to know each other when they come to visit. One woman comes every Sunday, sitting on a bench near her husband's tree. She always brings coffee and two pastries.
Another woman who bought a plot for her future burial told Bennett, "I can imagine my granddaughter getting married under my tree."
"It's a building of community as well as just a beautiful space," O'Neil said. "It really is developing into a much larger thing that I think either of us thought."
A place for best friend
At Life Forest, the ashes of beloved pets can be buried in the family plot as well.
One of the first trees that greets a visitor to Life Forest is a "pink diamond" hydrangea. Buried underneath are the ashes of a man and his dogs.
When a bird built its nest among the branches, the man's husband was overjoyed, Bennett said. "It makes him feel like he's happy where he is," she said. "And that's the beauty of nature."
To date, 45 people and 30 pets have been buried in the forest. Bennett said she feels a connection with every family who has come here.
One man came from New York state to bury the remains of his wife, who had been an opera singer, under a peach tree, her favorite. On the day of the burial, her husband played a recording of her singing.
"And to this day, I can look at that tree and I hear her voice," Bennett said. "That is the gift."
Life Forest uses soft woolen shrouds to protect the cremated remains. As the wool biodegrades, it releases sulfur, nitrogen and magnesium that offset the elements produced by the process of cremation. Otherwise, the salinity might kill the tree.
The property features a few manmade elements, including a "phone of the wind," modeled after a phone booth set up in Japan after the 2011 tsunami that killed thousands. An old-fashioned rotary telephone is attached to a large tree, where visitors can "call" their loved ones to deliver a message.
"You know who really likes it? The little kids who've lost a parent," Bennett said.
Some men struggle to process their grief, Bennett said. She gently points them to a trail that leads down to a brook. "They come back different," she said. "It's a kind of lovely unfolding you get to experience."
A natural end
Bennett's mom was the first person buried at Life Forest.
Her mother, who died in her 60s from early-onset Alzheimer's, "was an amazing human being," Bennett said.
The family lived in Lawrence, Mass., when Bennett was growing up, but her mother insisted on getting the children out to play. "She would take us to these big, rolling Catholic cemeteries," she said.
She hated it, she remembers telling her mother: "It's scary and it's depressing and I just don't want to be here."
She had no reason to be afraid, her mother reassured her. "It's just natural to die," she told her. "Someday I'll die and become a tree."
So after her mother died in 2016, Bennett began looking for a cemetery where she could plant a tree and bury her mom's ashes underneath. "Nobody would do it," she said.
A chance conversation with John O'Neil changed everything.
Both Bennett and O'Neil have adopted children from China. At a gathering for their adoptive family group in 2019, Bennett told O'Neil she was thinking of buying a piece of land so she could bury her mother's remains under a tree.
O'Neil loved the idea at once.
By the next day, they had decided to create a cemetery for others like them who want a more natural place to bury their loved ones.
A practical beauty
O'Neil, who has worked in real estate for 25 years, brings a wealth of knowledge about laws governing land use. They enlisted help from others to create Life Forest, including a tree surgeon and end-of-life experts.
Colton Sawyer, who teaches mathematics at Southern New Hampshire University and is Life Forest's director of mapping technology, created a system that uses GPS data to locate burial sites within Life Forest, so that visitors will be able to find them in the future.
Sawyer said he always feels a sense of calm when he's at Life Forest. "Watching how the forest has grown up around the love and care that people have put into this place has been absolutely amazing," he said.
Lee Webster, past president of the Green Burial Council, said Life Forest — while technically not "green burial" because it handles cremated remains rather than bodies — is providing a vital service for generations to come.
The cremation rate in New Hampshire in 2020 was 77.5%, the fifth-highest in the nation, according to the Cremation Association of North America. It was even higher during the pandemic.
Genealogical research is conducted through cemetery records, Webster said. When someone's ashes are scattered in the ocean or on a mountaintop, she said, the record ends at the crematorium.
But the names of those buried in Life Forest cemetery are recorded forever in Hillsborough town records as well as the county registry of deeds.
A place of peace
In the three years since its founding, the forest has stood in silent witness to terrible sorrow.
Among those buried here: a young man who died in violence, another who died by suicide, a young woman lost to a drug overdose.
At the funeral of a young father, the man's two little boys brought shovels to help plant their dad's tree. It was heartbreaking, Bennett said.
But this has since become a place where the boys come to see their dad's tree and hike in the woods, she said. "These children now don't feel scared to visit their dad," she said. "It kind of feels like a comma, not a period."
Some families bring relatives' cremated remains that they've kept for many years.
Last weekend, along with her mother's remains, Melissa LeBeau buried the ashes of her sister, who was 38 when she died of a drug overdose in 2017.
Her sister Renee was "the victim of a really bad life," she said. "Mental illness undiagnosed turned into addiction uncontrolled. It ripped the family apart and killed her."
Last Saturday's burial at Life Forest brought a sense of relief, and release, for her mother and her sister, LeBeau said.
"It reunited them," she said. "My mom was able to be back with her baby."
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For more: thelifeforest.com.
