Sympathy flowers in Collingswood

Haddon Avenue does not end at the borough line. It runs northwest out of Collingswood, crosses into Camden, and about a mile and a half along it passes the gate of Harleigh Cemetery at 1640 Haddon Avenue — the ground where Walt Whitman lies in the heavy granite tomb he designed for himself and paid for while he was still alive down the road on Mickle Street. For a family living in Collingswood, that is not a literary footnote. It is the road the cars take. A service that begins in the borough or in Haddonfield and ends at Harleigh is a single straight drive on one street, and the florists who serve this ZIP know the run because it is the same street their own deliveries use all day. If you are sending from out of town and someone tells you the burial is at Harleigh, you can picture the whole thing as one avenue.

The burial options a Collingswood family is most often given are all close in. Harleigh, on Haddon Avenue in Camden, takes graveside work from the whole region and is the one most out-of-state senders have heard of. Arlington Cemetery in Pennsauken sits a short run north across the Cooper. Colestown sits where Kings Highway crosses Church Road in Cherry Hill, on ground that has been a burying place longer than any of the surrounding townships have had names, about ten minutes from most borough addresses. Beyond those the grounds follow the pikes — Kings Highway south through Haddon Heights and Barrington, the Black Horse Pike through Bellmawr and Runnemede, Route 130 toward Brooklawn. Graveside delivery is the one kind of sympathy order that cannot be scheduled by date alone: the flowers have to be at the gate around the committal, not sometime that afternoon, so give the exact service time and the section or plot number if the family was given one. If the committal is private and only the church service is public, send to the funeral home or to the house instead.