Sympathy flowers in Berkeley

The first practical fact about a Berkeley sympathy order is one most senders discover late: there is no cemetery inside the city limits. Whatever the family decides, the burial or the inurnment happens outside Berkeley, and there are three places it usually happens. Sunset View Cemetery and Mortuary sits at 101 Colusa Avenue in El Cerrito, up on the ridge above Kensington — reached along Arlington Avenue through Kensington rather than off the freeway, which is why a driver coming from downtown Berkeley takes Marin Avenue or Solano Avenue north and climbs rather than heading for I-80. Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, the 1863 Olmsted-designed grounds at 5000 Piedmont Ave, sits at the head of Piedmont Avenue with the street running straight down from its gates; Jmiller Flowers at 4416 Piedmont Avenue is a few blocks below them on the same street, which makes that particular graveside run one of the shortest in this market. A block further down Piedmont Avenue is the Chapel of the Chimes, the Julia Morgan columbarium at 4499 Piedmont, where an inurnment service happens in a small stone room and a compact vase piece is the only thing that physically fits. Beyond those: St. Mary Cemetery on Howe Street in Oakland, Rolling Hills Memorial Park in Richmond, and Holy Sepulchre in Hayward at the far edge of the ring.

The service itself is the part that makes Berkeley unusual. This is a city where the religious buildings are concentrated and specific, and where a great many memorials are not held in a funeral home at all. Holy Hill, the block of Ridge Road and Le Conte Avenue north of campus, holds the Graduate Theological Union and the seminaries clustered around it — the Pacific School of Religion, the Church Divinity School of the Pacific on Ridge Road, Starr King School for the Ministry, the Jesuit School of Theology, and Zaytuna College — and a faculty or clergy memorial in this city has a real chance of being held in one of their chapels. Downtown and in the flats, the buildings people name are First Congregational Church of Berkeley at 2345 Channing Way, whose sanctuary doubles as a concert hall and is the most-used large memorial room in the city; First Presbyterian Church on Dana Street; St. Mark's Episcopal at 2300 Bancroft Way; All Souls Episcopal Parish on Cedar Street; St. Joseph the Worker on Addison Street and St. Mary Magdalen on Berryman Street for Catholic funeral Masses; St. Ambrose on Gilman Street in the northwest flats; Congregation Beth El at 1301 Oxford Street and Congregation Netivot Shalom on University Avenue; the Berkeley Buddhist Temple at 2121 Channing Way, a Jodo Shinshu congregation older than most of the neighborhood around it; Berkeley Zen Center on Russell Street; and in the Lorin District, McGee Avenue Baptist Church on Stuart Street, which anchors a South Berkeley Black church tradition that runs back generations. When the service is in Oakland, families from this side of the line often work with Fouché's Hudson Funeral Home on Telegraph Avenue.

Then the Berkeley thing that no other page in this catalogue has to explain. In this city the notice very often says *no flowers, please — donations to* something: a land trust, a clinic, a public school fund, a food program, a union hardship fund, a hospice. It is not a rebuff and it does not mean nothing should arrive. It means the family has decided against a room full of arrangements, usually for reasons they hold seriously. The correct response is smaller and more personal than a spray. A single plant to the house, where it stays alive for months and does not need water twice a day from someone who is not sleeping. A modest hand-tied bouquet delivered to the kitchen on the day of the service, when eleven people are in that kitchen making food. A compact arrangement for the shiva table, for the week of visiting, for the table where the photographs are. These land better than anything sent to the chapel would have, and they cost less. Make the donation as well, and write the card as if you were speaking rather than composing: the name of the person who died, one concrete memory, and your own name spelled the way they would recognise it. Card messages are free at checkout and the shop writes them out by hand.