In 2016, Mona Roy sat in the back seat with her grieving mother as her husband drove to her father’s cremation. Cars queued behind them as the funeral procession tracked toward Bridgeport, Connecticut, the nearest crematory capable of performing the havan ceremony, a Hindu end-of-life ritual that requires the eldest son of the deceased to light the flame that starts the ceremony.
“Grief became logistics,” Roy wrote in a letter this spring. “Mourning became transportation planning.”
Last month, the Ad Hoc Crematory Study Committee II voted 4-2 to delay building a crematory at Lexington’s Westview Cemetery that would serve the end-of-life rites for Hindus, Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists. The majority cited health and environmental concerns and the projected cost, and questioned whether there was enough need to justify the public investment.
Those objections frustrated committee members who supported the project, who accused their colleagues of bias and narrow thinking. Though the project is on hold, select board member and committee chair Joe Pato said the town may reconsider it in the future.
Lexington leaders appointed the committee in 2024 to investigate ways to ease the strain on families like Roy’s. The seven members re-examined a town report on the issue from 2019, which recommended against developing a crematory, and did more research. Each side then produced its own report on the topic.
The Board of Health laid out its concerns in two letters to the committee, focusing on pollutants and vaporized mercury emitted when bodies burn, the specialized permits required for crematory operations, and health risks to employees and nearby residents.
“Some of the issues may end up being irrelevant. Some may be very important. We just don’t know, and they require further investigation,” said Dr. Jillian Tung, who serves on both the Board of Health and the Ad Hoc Crematory Study Committee.
Committee members who voted against the delay, along with members of the public, have challenged the health board’s letters.
“People in the majority, at least in my view, came into this with rigid views and did not engage in the task posed to us by the town,” said committee member Archan Basu.
He cited the health board’s second letter as an example.
“It talked about the needs of the Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Sikh communities in Lexington ‘as expressed in the minority report’, which is bizarre because the minority report makes no reference to any such thing,” Basu said.
Tung said the letter attracted criticism because it raised the point that Hindu tradition calls for cremation within 24 hours. Massachusetts law requires a 48-hour wait before cremation, though people can apply for a waiver. The letter suggested that “the accelerated time frame heightens the concern for unintended events” and that cremating a body without checking it for a pacemaker or implants could cause an explosion or release of radiation.
“I’ve seen what can happen when protocols aren’t robust enough and cases are missed,” Tung said.
Dr. Evelyn Dickson, a longtime resident of Westview Street, which flanks the cemetery, objects to the project.
“For people living with [the crematory] 24 hours a day, it’s more than an inconvenience,” she said. “It’ll bring down our property values. It’ll be bad for our health. There’ll be noise coming from it.”
Her question for supporters: “If crematories were allowed on their street, would they be in favor of it?” Dickson asked. “I’m sure the answer would be no.”
Financial and capacity concerns also factored into the decision. Members who voted against the project cited the 2019 report, which projected building the crematory would cost slightly more than $1.3 million and operating it would cost more than $300,000. Specialized permits and the equipment necessary to filter organic pollutants would push the price higher.
Opponents also point out that the area near the cemetery is becoming more densely populated. In recent years, new condo and apartment buildings with hundreds of units have gone up nearby, and more are expected.
About 90 funeral homes and several hundred independent providers offer cremation services in the Boston area, but none of them accommodate the havan ceremony. The result is that many families travel to New Hampshire for the service. Five of New Hampshire’s crematories perform 150 to 200 cremations a year for Dharmic faith ceremonies for Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire, according to Pato.
Some people in Lexington doubt there is enough demand for the crematory to pay for itself.
“It would…lead to operating costs that didn’t seem like they would break even, even if you were to project that all deaths in Lexington would make use of the Lexington crematory,” said Pato.
For its 2019 report, the first committee interviewed staff at nine Massachusetts crematories and found none operated at capacity.
“They were in a price race to the bottom,” one unnamed manager in their report said.
The committee looked at other ways to offer this service. It asked existing crematories in the area to accommodate the havan ceremony and briefly considered partnering with a nonprofit to build the facility at Westview.
Sandeep Patel, a committee meeting observer, said it would be a mistake to think of this topic in numeric terms.
“This is not a niche thing,” said Patel. “This is what people are practicing, so any effort to make it seem like it’s a minority need is a futile effort.”
He said the discussion should not center on capacity.
“It’s more of what gives me a peaceful experience,” he said. “I don’t want to go to a place where there are 10 cremations a day. I’d rather go to a place that does one or two.”
Basu agreed, saying committee members who voted to delay the project relied on red herring arguments – capacity, utilization, commercial viability and air quality.
“This discussion, to my mind, should be about choice and compassion, overcoming historical bias,” he said.
For Roy, that compassion extends beyond her to the next generation. She worries that after she dies, it will be difficult for her youngest son to bring her eldest son, who has autism, to New Hampshire for the ritual.
“When I think about that, it’s heart stopping,” she said. “I don’t know how they will manage these demands under those circumstances, that they have to go all the way to New Hampshire in a nor’easter.”
Pato said attitudes about crematories may evolve as technology improves and the capacity increases. The construction of new housing developments nearby and the lack of surplus funding pose additional challenges to future development, he said.
“On a regular basis, you have to look at the community and say, ‘How is the community being served?’ and ‘Are we providing the right set of services?”’ Pato said. “So, it is appropriate to periodically consider.”
This story was written by a journalism student in BU’s Newsroom program, a partnership between the university, The Lexington Observer and other news organizations in the Boston area.