Sympathy flowers in Cinnaminson

Most towns make a grieving family drive. Cinnaminson, for once, does not. Givnish Funeral Home stands on Route 130 North inside the township, and Lakeview Memorial Park — the large memorial cemetery that takes a great many burials from this stretch of the Delaware — is on Route 130 as well, so the viewing address and the interment address usually sit on the same highway a few minutes apart. That single fact shapes almost every sympathy order placed here. It means the flowers you send for a Tuesday evening viewing and the flowers you send for a Wednesday morning graveside are travelling the same road at different hours, and it means a driver who knows Route 130 can do both without ever leaving the corridor. It also means the service schedule, not the delivery window, is what you are really booking against. A chapel runs several families through the same rooms in a week and moves the arrangements between them; an arrangement that arrives outside posted visiting hours waits in a back hallway with a card nobody has read yet. Put the name of the deceased and the hour of the viewing on the order and the problem disappears. Beyond Route 130 the geography widens quickly. Families who hold a funeral Mass often use St. Charles Borromeo on Branch Pike, and altar flowers there are the parish's own business rather than something a sender arranges from outside — the funeral home or the family's house is the better destination. Veterans' burials from this part of Burlington County frequently go up the river road to Beverly National Cemetery. A service held on the Camden County side, in Pennsauken or Cherry Hill, crosses more than a municipal boundary: Cinnaminson is Burlington County and therefore the Diocese of Trenton, while Pennsauken a few miles down Route 130 is Camden County and the Diocese of Camden, and families with roots on both sides of that line are common here. Then there is the quieter case, the one that arrives before any of this: a death at home, or in hospice care in Burlington County through Samaritan, or on a floor at Virtua Willingboro or Cooper in Camden. When that is where you are, the useful address is the house — a split-level off Riverton Road, a place at Cinnaminson Harbour — and the useful gift is something that can be set down on a table already crowded with food.

A word about the card, because it is handled differently at a chapel than at a house. A funeral director collects the cards from every arrangement in the room and hands them to the family as a bundle, usually days later when they finally sit down to answer them. So sign with your full name and your connection — the Thursday bowling league, your father's neighbour on Highland Avenue, the woman who drove him to his appointments — rather than a first name the family will puzzle over a week from now. Keep the message itself short, since these are read aloud more often than read privately. Two further notes particular to this occasion. If the family has asked for donations rather than flowers, honour that and send something to the house afterward instead: a plant on a counter a fortnight later, when the visitors have gone and the week has emptied, is remembered far longer than one more arrangement on a crowded chapel table. And most sympathy orders for Cinnaminson are placed inside a 24-to-72-hour window by somebody who lives nowhere near it, working from a text message with a chapel name in it. If that is you, enter the address exactly as it was written to you, add the hour of the viewing, and put your own mobile number on the order so a shop can reach you with a question instead of guessing.