Sympathy flowers in East Cleveland

East Cleveland's southwest shoulder runs into a burial ground. Lake View Cemetery keeps its main gate at 12316 Euclid Avenue, a few blocks from the city line, and its 285 acres climb the escarpment between Euclid Avenue, Mayfield Road and the Cleveland Heights boundary — the Garfield Memorial with the president entombed inside it, John D. Rockefeller's obelisk on the ridge, Wade Chapel with its Tiffany-designed interior, Eliot Ness remembered by a stone near the water. For a family living on Noble Road or Terrace Road, that proximity is not sentiment; it is logistics. It means the graveside half of a funeral is often a five-minute drive from the house, while the chapel or church half can be anywhere from East 185th Street to Shaker Heights, and it means a sympathy delivery has to be aimed at a specific building on a specific clock rather than at a city. The other cemeteries in regular use sit south and east: Highland Park Cemetery on Chagrin Boulevard, the City of Cleveland's own burial ground and the destination for a large share of East Side services; Calvary Cemetery at 10000 Miles Avenue, the Catholic diocese's principal cemetery; Knollwood Cemetery on SOM Center Road in Mayfield Heights; Mayfield Cemetery, the historic Jewish ground that adjoins Lake View off Mayfield Road in Cleveland Heights; and Whitehaven Memorial Park further out in Mayfield Village. Lake View's interior lanes are narrow, steep and easy to lose your bearings on, so a graveside order has to carry a section name or a plot number — hand a runner the cemetery name alone and he is circling a hillside while a service ends.

The service pattern here is worth understanding before you order, because it is not the single-afternoon pattern that sympathy guides assume. A great many East Cleveland funerals are homegoing services: a wake or calling hours at the funeral home on a Friday evening, then the service itself on Saturday morning at the family's church rather than at the chapel, then the burial, then a repast in the fellowship hall that can run into the afternoon. That is three rooms, and flowers sent to the wrong one arrive after the people have left it. E.F. Boyd & Son, the long-established firm with locations on East 89th Street in Cleveland and on Emery Road, handles a large share of these services, and the large East Side congregations — Olivet Institutional Baptist Church on Quincy Avenue, Antioch Baptist Church on Cedar Avenue — are the kind of sanctuary where the arrangement needs height and presence rather than delicacy. Brown-Forward, one of the county's oldest firms, over on Chagrin Boulevard in Shaker Heights, and Berkowitz-Kumin-Bookatz, the Jewish memorial chapel up on South Taylor Road in Cleveland Heights, cover the Heights services; Jakubs & Son on East 185th Street and Brickman Bros. on Euclid Avenue in Euclid take the lakefront parishes northeast of the city. One line in the order notes does more work than anything else you can write: which room, at what hour, on which day. Every shop here builds and schedules backward from that line, and none of them is able to guess it on your behalf.