Sympathy flowers in East Rutherford

A funeral for an East Rutherford family tends to happen on a single road, and knowing that road makes the order simple. Ridge Road runs south out of Lyndhurst through North Arlington, and it carries the chapels, the procession and the burial ground in one line: Costa Memorial Home and Nazare Memorial Home both sit on Ridge Road in Lyndhurst, Parow Funeral Home further along in North Arlington, and Holy Cross Cemetery and Mausoleum at 340 Ridge Road in North Arlington is the Archdiocese of Newark ground that takes the majority of Catholic burials from this end of Bergen County. On the borough's other side the chapel corridor is Lincoln Avenue in Rutherford, where Ippolito-Stellato Funeral Home and Collins-Calhoun Funeral Home serve the families who live on the Park Avenue and Union Avenue grid, and to the northwest Aloia Funeral Home on Harrison Avenue in Garfield takes the Wallington and Garfield side. Worth noticing: Flowers Bychuck, at 469 Ridge Rd. in Lyndhurst, stands on that same road as the chapels and the burial ground — 2.3 miles from the 07073 centroid, on a run it makes without turning off. That is geography, not an arrangement between businesses, but on a day when the timing has to be right it is the kind of geography that helps.

Beyond Holy Cross, the burial map opens in four directions and each one wants a different lead time. South and east, Hillside Cemetery in Lyndhurst and Arlington Cemetery on Schuyler Avenue in Kearny are short runs, as is Flower Hill Cemetery in North Bergen and Fairview Cemetery over in Fairview. West, East Ridgelawn Cemetery on Delawanna Avenue in Clifton and Cedar Lawn Cemetery in Paterson take the Passaic County families, and Mount Olivet in Newark holds older civic plots. North, George Washington Memorial Park in Paramus is the long end of the radius. Jewish burials from this corner generally go to the cemeteries clustered along the Paterson and Totowa line, and there the custom is usually not to send cut flowers to the service at all — a gift in memory to a charity is the accepted form, and where something physical is wanted, food or a living plant brought to the house after the burial is what is done. When you genuinely do not know a family's practice, telephone the funeral home. They field the question several times a day and answer it plainly, and no one has ever been offended by a card that arrived without flowers attached. For a graveside piece anywhere on this map, the date alone is not enough: give the hour of the service and the plot or section reference if the family has passed it on, and ask whether the grounds would rather the piece was dropped at the office. A number of them keep the gates shut to anything that is not part of a booked procession, and a spray that turns up once the cortege has moved on is a kindness nobody present gets to see.