Massachusetts Municipal Duty to Bury a Veteran and Care for the Grave

Massachusetts imposes two municipal duties around a veteran's death, and both are duties rather than discretionary programmes. The burial. Section 7 makes the veterans' agent of each city and town the burial agent, except in Boston where the soldiers' relief commission designates one who must be a veteran. The burial agent shall cause properly to be interred the body of any veteran or adult dependent who dies without sufficient means to defray funeral expenses, and the body of any dependent child of a veteran where the veteran and their spouse or widowed person are without sufficient means. Where interment has already happened without the burial agent's knowledge, an application may be made within 60 days after the date of death, or after final interment if the veteran died in the service, and the agent may certify it if the deceased came within the section on investigation. A family that has already paid for a funeral has a window, and 60 days is short. Section 8 sets the money, and the figures in it cannot be reconciled with each other on the face of the section. The first sentence provides that where the estate has insufficient resources the burial agent shall expend not more than $4,000 for the funeral and burial, provided that the cost of the funeral and burial shall be not more than $5,000, with any resources of the deceased deducted from the maximum. The next sentence then provides that no city or town shall be reimbursed for a single burial if the total expense of the burial, exclusive of the purchase price of the grave, the grave opening and a cement vault liner where the cemetery requires one, exceeded $500 for a child under seven or $900 for any other person. Those two sentences describe different worlds. The first contemplates a $4,000 expenditure; the second bars reimbursement where the total expense exceeded $900. The $500 and $900 figures are vestigial, left behind when the expenditure limit was modernised, and this catalog cannot tell a reader how a given municipality and the Secretary reconcile them in practice. What a family should do is ask the burial agent what the town will actually pay before committing to a funeral home, and get it in writing. Two dignity provisions in section 8 are worth knowing and are commonly not. The burial shall not be made in a cemetery or burial ground used exclusively for the burial of persons under chapter 117, the general poor relief chapter, or in any part of a cemetery so used. And relatives of the deceased who are unable to bear the expense of burial may be allowed to conduct the funeral. A family is not required to hand the service over to the town. Seventy-five per cent of the amounts paid and allowed for burial expenses is reimbursed by the commonwealth to the city or town on or before November 10 in the year after the expenditure, the same ratio as chapter 115 benefits generally. And notwithstanding the residence requirements of section 5, the Secretary may authorise a burial agent to arrange the proper interment of the body of an indigent veteran who dies within the commonwealth, so a veteran who died far from anywhere they had lived is still covered. Section 7 carries two exclusions that have survived a century. The section does not apply to a person who at the time of entering federal service was a subject or citizen of a neutral country, had filed an intention to become a United States citizen and afterwards withdrew it under the act of Congress approved July 9, 1918. And it does not apply to any person designated upon their discharge as a conscientious objector. Nebraska has a comparable conscientious objector bar in its veterans aid statute; the two are among the last of their kind in this catalog. Section 7 does extend to a person who served as a Massachusetts state guardsman between April 5, 1917 and December 21, 1919, or in the state guard established during World War II, and was honorably discharged, though not to that person's dependents. The graves. Section 9, as rewritten by section 125 of the 2024 HERO Act, requires the mayor of every city and the select board of every town to appoint a resident of that municipality who shall be a veteran as a veterans' graves officer, for a term the appointing authority sets not exceeding five years. The HERO Act added a fallback: if no qualified, willing and able veteran seeks the appointment, a spouse of a veteran or a member of a Gold Star family may be appointed. The duty is specific. The graves officer shall cause every veteran's grave within the city or town to be suitably kept and cared for, including clearing weeds and unseemly growth, repairing and replacing fences, and raising and repairing sunken gravestones and markers. Where the cost is not met by private persons or by the cemetery trustees, the city or town pays it, capped per grave at what the cemetery charges for annual care of like lots. And the flags. In cities and towns where there are cemeteries containing the remains of deceased veterans, the municipality shall cause a flag of the United States to be placed on such veterans' graves on every Memorial Day. The commonwealth reimburses 75 per cent of the cost of the flags but none of the expense of placing them, which is why the placing is done by volunteers. Where there are mausoleums containing veterans' remains, the municipality must place a plaque naming all the deceased veterans in it and a flag at the mausoleum each Memorial Day. A family that finds a veteran's grave neglected in a Massachusetts cemetery has a named official to call and a statutory duty to point at.