Sympathy flowers in Brooklawn

Almost nothing about a Brooklawn funeral happens in Brooklawn. The borough is half a square mile with no chapel of its own, so the viewing is over the line in Gloucester City, or east in Bellmawr, or down Route 45 in Woodbury, and the Mass is at a parish church a few minutes away — which means the practical question for anyone sending flowers is never the recipient's home address but the address of the room the family will be standing in on a specific morning. McCann-Healey Funeral Home in Gloucester City is the closest of the chapels Brooklawn families use and is reached without touching a highway. Schetter Funeral Home in Bellmawr sits on the other side of the Route 168 and I-295 tangle. McGuinness Funeral Home in Woodbury is a straight run south on Route 45 from the Brooklawn Circle. Kain-Murphy Funeral Services in Haddonfield and Falco Caruso & Leonard Memorial Home in Pennsauken pull in the families who moved out of the borough a generation ago but came back for the service. Brooklawn is in the Diocese of Camden, and the parish churches in rotation are Saint Mary Parish in Gloucester City, Sacred Heart Church at Broadway and Ferry Avenue in Camden, the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception on Market Street in Camden, and Saint Rose of Lima in Haddon Heights. Tell us the chapel or church name and the time the doors open, and the delivery is built backward from that.

The burial side of a Brooklawn service runs to a handful of grounds, each on a different road out of the borough. New Saint Mary's Cemetery in Bellmawr is the Camden Diocese ground most borough Catholic families use and is perhaps ten minutes from Crescent Boulevard. Harleigh Cemetery in Camden, where Walt Whitman's tomb stands, takes the older Camden-city families and is up Route 130 and Haddon Avenue. Mount Peace Cemetery in Lawnside, the historically Black borough east of the White Horse Pike, serves families with roots in that community and is about a quarter hour out. Colestown Cemetery in Cherry Hill handles the Route 70 side. And Beverly National Cemetery, up the river in Beverly, is where veterans from this borough are buried — which matters more here than the population would suggest, because Brooklawn's American Legion Post 72 has been one of the loudest civic institutions in a very small town for generations, and a Post 72 family will often want a tribute that reads as military honors rather than a parlor piece. Graveside arrangements have their own constraint everywhere, and it is worth saying plainly: cemeteries want pieces that can be carried, set and removed, so an easel spray that works beautifully inside a chapel may be refused at an open grave in a February wind coming off Big Timber Creek. Say which part of the day the flowers are for and the studio builds for that, not for a photograph.