Sympathy flowers in Brea

Brea's northern edge is the Orange County line, and that geographic accident shows up in its funerals. A family who has been in the hills since the tract was built may bury at Memory Garden Memorial Park, 455 West Central Avenue, a few blocks west of Brea Boulevard on the flat ground below the old oil field - and because Memory Garden is a mortuary as well as a cemetery, the service and the committal can share one address, which removes an entire problem from the delivery. Other Brea families go the other direction entirely, north over the ridge to Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Rowland Heights, inside the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Between those two poles sit the venues most often named on Brea service cards: in Fullerton, McAulay & Wallace Mortuary at 902 North Harbor Boulevard, with a second chapel on Rose Drive in Yorba Linda, and the city cemetery at Loma Vista, 701 East Bastanchury Road. South in Anaheim, Hilgenfeld Mortuary at 120 East Broadway; also in Anaheim, Melrose Abbey Memorial Park, 2303 South Manchester Avenue. West across the La Habra hills, Rose Hills Memorial Park, 3888 South Workman Mill Road in Whittier. Southwest in Cypress, Forest Lawn Memorial-Park on Lincoln Avenue. Down the freeway: Holy Sepulcher Cemetery, 7845 Santiago Canyon Road in Orange, for a Catholic burial, and Fairhaven Memorial Park, 1702 East Fairhaven Avenue in Santa Ana. Give a florist the venue first; everything else follows from it.

The Catholic volume in this city runs largely through St. Angela Merici at 585 South Walnut Avenue, a Diocese of Orange parish with a school on the same grounds. What gets used at a Funeral Mass there is whatever a sacristan can lift alone and set down again - an easel piece, a low design for the side of the sanctuary, a sheaf carried in by hand. Many Brea families gather for a rosary the evening before, and that hour is frequently when flowers do the most work, since it is the gathering neighbours and colleagues actually attend. Tell us if the arrangement has to travel from the church to a graveside afterwards and the designer will pick mechanics that survive the back of a car. But it is worth saying plainly that a great many sympathy orders in this city never reach a chapel. California cremates the clear majority of its dead, and what follows here is often a reception in a Country Hills backyard a fortnight later, a room booked at the Community Center on Madison Way, or simply a household off Lambert where nothing has been decided yet. Those runs are easier to schedule and often more useful: something compact, in a vessel that does not have to come back, sized for a counter rather than a hall table. Families who prefer a donation and one plant for the house should just say so on the order - it is a common instruction here, not an unusual one.