Sympathy flowers in Baton Rouge

Most Baton Rouge sympathy orders are placed inside a 36-hour window, and the deadline is not the cutoff — it is the visitation. South Louisiana keeps the older rhythm: obituary in the Advocate, visitation on the morning of the service or the evening before, a rosary at the funeral home for Catholic families, then the Mass or the service, then the drive to the cemetery. Flowers therefore have two possible destinations and a hard arrival time. Pieces meant to be seen by visitors — standing sprays, easel tributes, baskets — belong at the funeral home an hour and a half to two hours before visitation opens, because the director positions them and the family arrives to a room already set. Pieces meant for the church arrive with the sacristan's permission and are placed before the processional. A casket spray is the family's own piece and almost always goes to the funeral home rather than the church. If you know only one fact when you order, make it the time and place of the visitation; the rest can be built around it.

The chapels here are a small, long-established set, and each has its own room layout and delivery door. Rabenhorst Funeral Home runs two locations — the historic downtown chapel at 825 Government Street and Rabenhorst East at 11000 Florida Boulevard — and has been burying Baton Rouge families since 1865. Greenoaks Funeral Home sits on its own memorial park at 9595 Florida Boulevard, so service and graveside can happen on one property. Resthaven Gardens of Memory does the same at 11817 Jefferson Highway. Hall Davis & Son Funeral Service on Scenic Highway and Winnfield Funeral Home serve much of north Baton Rouge and the Scotlandville community, where a homegoing service runs longer and the program and the flowers are both part of it. Out in the parishes: Charlet Funeral Home on Plank Road in Zachary, Seale Funeral Home in Denham Springs and across Livingston Parish, Ourso Funeral Home in Gonzales and Donaldsonville. Church services fill in around them — St. Joseph Cathedral on North Street, St. Aloysius on Stuart Avenue, Our Lady of Mercy on Marquette, St. Thomas More on Goodwood, St. George off Jefferson, St. Jude the Apostle on Highland Road, plus Shiloh Missionary Baptist, Mount Zion First Baptist on East Boulevard, St. Francis Xavier on Apollo Avenue, Istrouma Baptist and Bethany Church.

Graveside work in this climate is its own problem. Roselawn Memorial Park on North Street, Greenoaks Memorial Park and Resthaven carry most of the city's interments; Magnolia Cemetery off Florida Street is the historic ground where the 1862 Battle of Baton Rouge was fought and where nineteenth-century families are buried; Sweet Olive Cemetery is one of the oldest African-American burial grounds in the city; St. Joseph Cemetery on Main Street holds the oldest Catholic plots. Veterans' families use Port Hudson National Cemetery on Port Hickey Road in Zachary and the newer Louisiana National Cemetery, also in Zachary, both of which run on a fixed committal-shelter schedule that does not wait — an arrangement that misses the window cannot be walked out to the site later. Anything standing outdoors from May through September needs hardy material and a weighted base: gladiolus, chrysanthemum, carnation, dendrobium orchid and heavy foliage hold up in Gulf humidity where hydrangea and open garden roses collapse by the second hour. In hurricane season a service can move entirely; if it does, tell us and the arrangement is rebuilt for the new date rather than delivered to an empty chapel.

A large share of these orders comes from outside Louisiana, and out-of-state senders hit the same three problems. The first is not knowing the arrangements: if you have the obituary, you have what we need — the funeral home, the visitation window and the spelling of the name. If you do not, send to the family's home address instead of guessing at a chapel, because a piece delivered to the wrong funeral home on the morning of a service does not get retrieved in time. The second is not knowing which piece is yours to send. Casket sprays belong to the immediate family; if you are a coworker, a neighbor, a church friend or a classmate, the appropriate gestures are a standing spray or easel piece to the visitation, a plant to the house, or a group arrangement signed by an office or a team. The third is the card. Write your full name, not a nickname, and include how you knew the person — the family in Mid City reading fifty cards a week later will not place a first name alone. Two more practical Baton Rouge notes: south Louisiana funerals are followed by a repast, so food and plants sent to the house in the days afterward are genuinely useful, and a second delivery two or three weeks later, once the crowd has thinned and the casseroles are gone, is the one people remember years on.