Sympathy flowers in Dublin

Behind the storefronts of Historic Dublin, up North High Street, there is a small burying ground with stones worn back to outlines — the Dublin Cemetery, the village's original graveyard from the era when this was a limestone crossing on the Scioto rather than a Fortune 500 suburb. It is a useful thing to know when you are sending sympathy flowers here, because it tells you the shape of the problem: Dublin is a city of 43016 and 43017 households, but it is not a city of funeral chapels. Almost every Dublin service runs through a Franklin or Delaware County firm, and the address on the obituary is usually not a Dublin address. In practice that means Schoedinger Funeral and Cremation Service — the Columbus family firm operating since 1855, with chapels spread across the county — Tidd Family Funeral Home in neighboring Hilliard, Rutherford-Corbin Funeral Home in Worthington, Moreland Funeral Home in Westerville, and Egan-Ryan Funeral Service in Columbus for Catholic families. Read the obituary twice before ordering: the visitation address, the service address and the burial address are frequently three different places, and flowers sent to the wrong one arrive after everyone has left. Give us the chapel name and the hour of the viewing or the Mass, and the studio works backwards from it.

The week after a death in Franklin County follows a fairly predictable shape, and knowing it tells you when to send. The obituary posts within a day or two and names the funeral home, the visitation hours and the service. Visitation is commonly an evening — two to four hours, often the night before — and that is the window your chapel arrangement needs to be standing for, which means delivery in the afternoon at the latest. The service follows the next morning, frequently a Mass at a parish like St. Brigid of Kildare or a chapel service at the funeral home itself, then a committal at the cemetery and a luncheon somewhere nearby. Flowers sent on the morning of a morning service are a gamble; flowers sent the afternoon before are not. What goes on the card matters more than most senders expect. Write the relationship plainly — how you knew them, one specific thing you remember — and sign your full name, because the family will be reading dozens of cards with only first names on them and trying to place each one. Avoid instruction and avoid silver linings. If the obituary says *in lieu of flowers*, take it at face value and give to the named charity; if it says *donations to* something specific and you also want to send flowers, the graceful split is the donation now and a small arrangement to the house in two or three weeks. That later send is the one Dublin families remember. The casseroles stop, the visitors stop, and the Ballantrae or Historic Dublin driveway is empty again around day twenty — which is also when the first birthday, the first anniversary of the death, and the first holiday without them start arriving. A bouquet then is not late. It is the only one that shows up when the house is quiet.