Sandy Gibson remembers that his mother thought about the end of her life a lot.
When he was 5, his mother found out she had terminal cancer. She was only 39 years old.
"My mom grew up in a very religious family, and she'd ask, 'Why would God do this to me?'" said Gibson. "Why would she have a 5-year-old and an 8-year-old and have a terminal illness?"

One year before his mother passed away — when Gibson was 10 years old — his father died of complications due to a stroke. For most of his life, Gibson never wanted to visit that site where his parents were buried.
"It never felt like the right place for them," he said.
His personal experience with loss is, in part, what inspired Gibson to co-found Better Place Forests — an alternative to cemeteries, where families can claim a redwood tree as a grave marker and scatter their loved one's ashes.
The company currently has two locations in California — Point Arena and Santa Cruz — and is hoping to expand to locations in Oregon, Colorado, Arizona and Washington.
According to Gibson, scattering remains at Better Place Forests involves two rituals. First, selecting a tree. Families come to the forest together to decide which section of the forest speaks to them.
"Because while it's in a 20-acre forest, you might have 50 different sections that feel very different," Gibson explained. "It might be that the birds live in one section, or the fact that rhododendrons are in another."
Choosing a tree also involves deciding if you want to be scattered alone, or with your pets and family members. Better Place offers five different tree options with varying scattering rights.

Once the tree is selected, the second ritual is the spreading ceremony, where family members gather to scatter the ashes.
As part of the experience, Better Place takes the cremains and mixes them with local soil to rebalance the pH.