LEE – Ken and Amy Chandonait will try to begin their healing after many months of heartache when they lay Nicholas Chandonait to rest on Sunday.

The 6-week-old boy, who endured five surgeries for a congenital heart defect and a collapsed diaphragm before he died of a blood clot on Feb. 13, will be buried in a private ceremony at Woodlawn Cemetery in Lee, said Steve Clay of Clay’s Funeral Home of Lincoln.

“It will be a very hard day,” family friend Jennifer Gordon said Friday. “The family is having a hard time with this. They are just looking for closure.”

The family’s struggle became more difficult because of a disagreement with Winn town officials, said Lisa Leonard, mother of 26-year-old Amy Chandonait.

The family wished to bury Nicholas next to predeceased family members in the town-owned East Winn Cemetery and to reserve space for Ken and Amy and other family members, but town officials refused, citing a residents-only cemetery regulation and a lack of space.

“It’s just cruel. The kids shouldn’t have had to go through this hassle,” Leonard said. “They don’t need it. It was about keeping the family together. It’s kind of an old-fashioned thing. If you’re lucky, you can have them [family members] all together.”

Winn officials had to adhere to their regulations and concerns about creating precedent, Selectwoman Jeannie Thurlow said.

“We explained, we tried to be nice, but we can’t make exceptions,” Thurlow said. “We were willing to [allow the baby’s burial] because there was room for it, and then they asked for four more lots. We told them that we couldn’t do that because we didn’t have the room.”

Leonard challenged the selectmen’s decision, saying the cemetery in East Winn had room enough to accommodate the family, especially since a resident just donated land to a cemetery in town. She said other Winn families have been allowed to bury out-of-town members without any fuss and that her family offered to pay for the burial.

“We have been up there and walked through the cemetery. It’s not a huge cemetery, but there is room,” Leonard said.

Thurlow said the cemetery’s appearance is deceptive. Much of the land in the back end of the burial ground is swampy and not suitable for burials and other areas already are claimed as burial-plot reservations. She said that in her 14 years as a selectman, town officials have enforced the residents-only requirement unless plots for out-of-town residents already had been reserved. Resident burials are free.

“We have had our administrative assistant tell her sister-in-law ‘no’ because she lives in Caribou,” Thurlow said.

So the Chandonait family will hold the funeral in Lee. And it will be, as Gordon said, a very hard day.

“They just want to put it behind them, if they can,” she said.