MANDEVILLE, Manchester – With concerns mounting regarding cemeteries running out of burial space and some families opting not to cremate their loved ones, the chairman of the local municipality here and a renowned funeral director are suggesting crypt burials.

The crypt is like a grave, except it is aboveground and can be in a mausoleum (building) or outdoors in a cemetery.

President of the Jamaica Association of Certified Embalmers (JACE) and Funeral Directors Calvin Lyn, who is also a proprietor at Lyn’s funeral home and Oaklawn Memorial Gardens located in Manchester, said the idea of crypt burials first came to him when a family requested it two decades ago.

“We had taken up that with the parish council 20-odd years ago and they said the public health [authority] wasn’t in support of it, but I believe with the way forward and with the landscape… it should be considered,” he said on Tuesday.

He added that crypt burials are popular overseas and that Jamaica needs to get the Public Health Funeral Establishment and Mortuary Operations Regulation passed, which would address its viability.

“In Florida I have been to some at the cemetery and it is like a house that can accommodate couple hundred [of caskets], depending on the acreage of the lands, and you will have maybe 10 high at the crypt and you have to use a lift to get them in and so on,” he said.

“I believe that over time it should be considered, but especially it would have to be like what the Ministry of Health is saying now within the regulation, that they are still not approving that the bodies must be embalmed to help eliminate bacteria,” he said.

“The caskets are placed in the crypt and it is sealed,” he added.

Lyn sought to distinguish the difference between a crypt burial and a columbarium, which is a multi-unit structure that stores urns containing cremated remains of the deceased.

The columbarium consists of a number of individual units, called niches, housing one urn each. He said he intends to revisit the idea of crypt burials.

Funeral directors, said Lyn, need to have a relook at crypt burials, and talk with the local authorities — municipal corporation and health department — and get them to consider it again.

“We know we have space that we could put in one, even for a trial, with one hundred [caskets],” he said.

Mayor of Mandeville and Chairman of the Manchester Municipal Corporation Donovan Mitchell said the idea is under discussion after it was recently suggested by a citizen. He said the structure could accommodate thousands of spaces.

“You keep going up instead of spreading out, which is always the better deal,” he said.

Mitchell said it would be ideal with the Mandeville Cemetery closed and Melrose Cemetery now being used.

He said years ago there were discussions for 50 acres of mined-out land to be handed over for the operation of another public cemetery in Manchester.

“… If you are going to be doing something like that you start with a new cemetery on a new plot of land where the outlay, the design, everything would have been done in a particular manner so as to maximise the usage of the cemetery,” he said.

He added that the routine maintenance of cemeteries is costly as it relates to de-bushing.