Sympathy flowers in Alpine

Alpine is one of the few towns where the sympathy question is never "where in town" — it is always "which town, and in which direction." The borough contains no funeral home and no burial ground. Its single house of worship is Alpine Community Church on Church Street, and beyond Borough Hall and the one small school there is no civic building where mourners assemble. So the family that lost someone in Alpine holds the service somewhere else, and the geography of the Palisades ridge decides where. North and west into the Northern Valley boroughs — Closter, Demarest, Cresskill, Norwood, Northvale, Harrington Park, Old Tappan — reached on Piermont Road and Closter Dock Road. South down Route 9W through Englewood Cliffs to Fort Lee, seven miles and about fifteen minutes when the bridge approaches behave. West to the county's larger chapels in Hackensack, Teaneck, Paramus and Fair Lawn, half an hour by way of Route 4 or Route 17. Or across the Hudson entirely, to Yonkers, Mount Vernon, New Rochelle, the Bronx or Nyack, where a great many families on this side of the river still bury their people.

This page will not print a list of funeral homes, and that is a deliberate choice rather than a gap. Bergen County's chapels are largely family businesses, several of them second and third generation, and they merge, move and change their names on a cycle no landing page keeps up with. Someone arranging a service has an afternoon of real work ahead of them and cannot spend part of it discovering that a published address was three years stale. Do it the direct way instead, which is also the way the trade actually runs: type the home's exact name, street, town and the hour the doors open into the delivery notes, and the shop telephones the director before it loads the van. That call settles the two things that decide whether the piece lands well — where in that particular room it should be set, and whether it should arrive before a session or between two of them. Directors take dozens of those calls a week and expect this one.

The burial grounds are the stable part of the map, and these are the ones inside the eighteen-mile radius. George Washington Memorial Park in Paramus takes a wide share of non-sectarian Bergen burial. Cedar Park and Beth El, also in Paramus, serve the Jewish families of the Northern Valley and the towns below it. Brookside Cemetery in Englewood is the nearest large ground to Alpine on the New Jersey side, about six miles down the ridge. Madonna Cemetery in Fort Lee is Archdiocese of Newark ground, which is the archdiocese Alpine belongs to. And Rockland Cemetery in Sparkill, five miles north-west over the New York state line by way of Route 9W and Route 340, takes a share of the burials from the top of the county. Put the cemetery name in the order, never just the town — Paramus alone holds several, and a graveside piece has to be standing before the procession turns in. There is no second attempt at a graveside delivery. Once the cars leave, it is a bouquet in an empty field.