Sympathy flowers in Bala Cynwyd

Most towns send their sympathy flowers away. Bala Cynwyd receives them. West Laurel Hill Cemetery opened at 215 Belmont Avenue in 1869 as the newer companion to Laurel Hill across the river, and a century and a half later its mausoleum rows, hillside sections and chapel still take burials and committals from families who live nowhere near Lower Merion — which is why a large share of the sympathy orders on this grid come from Ohio or Florida or California for a service on a Bala Cynwyd hillside at ten in the morning. Westminster Cemetery sits on the same Belmont Avenue, and the older Laurel Hill on Ridge Avenue in East Falls is a few minutes away across the Schuylkill. Two things follow from that, and both are practical. First, a cemetery of this age runs on a section-and-lot system and a groundskeeping office, so a graveside piece needs to be standing before the committal begins, not carried in behind the family; ask the funeral director for the section and lot, and put it on the order. Second, an open hillside in Lower Merion takes down a tall glass vase in one gust. Weighted vessels, low forms, or a piece on a proper stand are what survive the morning.

Where the service is held matters more than which shop is nearest, so start with the obituary and copy it exactly. Funeral homes change hands and change names, viewings and services are frequently at two different addresses on two different days, and a beautiful arrangement delivered to the right building on the wrong morning is the one error in this category that cannot be repaired. Bringhurst Funeral Home operates on the West Laurel Hill grounds on Belmont Avenue, which makes it the closest chapel address in town to the town's own cemetery. South and west of here the chapels most Lower Merion and Delaware County families use are Stretch Funeral Home on Eagle Road in Havertown, Donohue Funeral Home in Newtown Square and Upper Darby, and D'Anjolell Memorial Home on West Chester Pike in Broomall. For Jewish funerals, families here generally work with Philadelphia-area chapels rather than suburban ones — Goldsteins' Rosenberg's Raphael-Sacks and Joseph Levine & Sons are the two names that come up most often, both at city addresses. On the parish side, St. Matthias on Bryn Mawr Avenue and the Church of St. Asaph on Conshohocken State Road are the two Bala Cynwyd churches, and the surrounding Catholic volume runs through St. Margaret in Narberth, Presentation B.V.M. in Wynnewood, St. John Vianney in Gladwyne and Our Mother of Good Counsel in Bryn Mawr. What a studio needs from you is short: building name, street address as printed, date, hour, and the family surname as it should read on the ribbon.