Sympathy flowers in Avon Lake

The thing that shapes a sympathy order in Avon Lake is a line on a map that nobody thinks about until there is a funeral. The city's eastern edge is the Cuyahoga County boundary — the next street over is Bay Village — while everything west and south of it is Lorain County. Families here live on one side of that line and bury on the other all the time. A household that has been on the Lake Road shore for forty years may hold calling hours at the chapel on Electric Boulevard, celebrate the funeral Mass at St. Joseph Catholic Church a few blocks away, and then drive west to a Lorain County cemetery, or east into Cuyahoga County where an older generation was buried when the family lived in Lakewood or Cleveland. Practically, that means the useful question when you are sending flowers is not "which town" but "which address, at which hour." The visitation address and the burial address in an Avon Lake week are frequently twenty-five minutes apart and in different counties, and a tribute sent to the wrong one of the two arrives to an empty room.

Busch Funeral and Crematory Services keeps the chapel inside Avon Lake, on Electric Boulevard, and it handles a large share of the city's services along with its other west-side locations. West and south, in Lorain County, families use Dovin Funeral Home, the Gluvna-Shimo-Hromada Funeral Chapel, Reidy-Scanlan-Giovannazzo in Lorain and Dovin & Reber Jones Funeral & Cremation Center in Elyria, plus the Amherst, Sheffield, Avon, North Ridgeville and Vermilion chapels serving their own towns. East across the county line the Avon Lake names that come up most are the McGorray-Hanna chapels in Westlake and Lakewood and Jenkins Funeral Chapel in Westlake. We deliver to the chapels not listed here on exactly the same terms — the list is not a limit, it is just where the volume tends to go. What the order actually needs is three things: the funeral home's name and town, the deceased's full name as the family gave it to the chapel, and the hour the room opens. With those, a director will tell the driver where the family wants a piece placed. Without the hour, the delivery is a guess.

The cemeteries set the second half of the schedule, and here too the split runs both ways. Going west, Ridge Hill Memorial Park in Amherst takes families from the western half of Lorain County, and Elmwood Cemetery and Calvary Cemetery in Lorain carry a great deal of the county's older and Catholic burials. Going east, Sunset Memorial Park in North Olmsted and Holy Cross Cemetery in Brook Park — the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland's large west-side ground — are the two most common destinations for Avon Lake families whose plots predate the move out to the shore, and the Elyria burying grounds and the township cemeteries out through Sheffield, Avon and Vermilion are inside the radius as well. Graveside flowers are timed to the committal hour rather than to the day, so an order for a grave needs the cemetery name, the section if the family has it, and the hour. Two local notes worth acting on. Most of these grounds are open and treeless, and a Lake Erie winter delivers a wind that a tall vase will not survive on frozen ground — ask for a spiked or weighted container between November and April. And the simpler plan, the one most families on this shore already use, is to send everything to the chapel and let the funeral director carry the pieces to the grave after the service. Directors on both sides of the county line do that routinely.