Sympathy flowers in Bloomington

Bloomington buries its dead under its own stone. The hills that run south from Monroe County through Oolitic and Bedford are the Salem limestone belt that clad the Empire State Building, the Pentagon and a long list of state capitols, and the same quarries and stone mills cut the monuments in the local cemeteries — which is why a Monroe County burial ground reads differently from a suburban memorial park almost anywhere else, with carved limestone work by hands that did it for a living. Rose Hill Cemetery, just west of downtown and a short run from both benches, is the city's historic burial ground and the one visitors ask about, partly because Hoagy Carmichael — Bloomington-born, IU-educated, the man who wrote *Stardust* — is buried there. Valhalla Memory Gardens on the west side carries much of the modern interment. And in the middle of the Indiana University campus, beside Beck Chapel and a few steps from Dunn's Woods, sits Dunn Cemetery, a small family burial ground the university built around rather than moved, still reserved for descendants of the Dunn family who sold IU the land. Beyond the city limits the map turns into township cemeteries — Clear Creek, Bloomfield and Ellettsville country, the rural grounds out toward Unionville and Smithville — the kind of small hillside plots where a graveside service happens with a dozen cars parked along a gravel shoulder and the timing is exact because nobody is standing outside in an Indiana February longer than they must.

For a university town of this size the religious range is wide, and it is worth a question rather than an assumption. St. Charles Borromeo and the St. Paul Catholic Center on campus carry the Catholic services; First United Methodist, Trinity Episcopal and First Presbyterian sit downtown within a few blocks of each other; Sherwood Oaks Christian Church anchors the south side. Congregation Beth Shalom and the Helene G. Simon Hillel Center serve the Jewish community, and in most Jewish practice flowers are not sent to the chapel at all — a donation in the person's memory is the convention, and a plant sent to the shiva home is the appropriate gesture, not a bouquet at the service. The Islamic Center of Bloomington serves a community where flowers are generally not part of the burial and a condolence visit with food carries the meaning instead. And Bloomington holds something almost no comparable town does: the Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center on the east side, founded by Thubten Jigme Norbu, the Dalai Lama's elder brother, who taught at IU for decades — Tibetan Buddhist observance runs on a forty-nine-day cycle after a death, so the meaningful moment is often weeks after the date everyone else marked. Ask the family or the chapel what is wanted. Getting this right is a sympathy card's whole purpose and no arrangement compensates for getting it wrong.