Sympathy flowers in Edison

Edison is an unusual place to send sympathy flowers, for a reason nobody explains to an out-of-state sender: the seat of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Metuchen sits inside the borough that Edison wraps completely around. The Cathedral of St. Francis of Assisi is a Main Street, Metuchen address, and it is a plausible venue for an Edison family's funeral Mass, which means the correct delivery address for an Edison death is frequently not an Edison address at all. The township's own parishes handle most of them — St. Helena on Grove Avenue in the northern half, St. Matthew the Apostle on Seymour Avenue — and the older congregations carry their own funerals too: St. James Episcopal on Woodbridge Avenue in the Piscatawaytown section, which keeps a colonial churchyard beside it, and Stelton Baptist on Plainfield Avenue, one of the oldest Baptist congregations in the state. The single most useful thing you can do before ordering is get the street address of the building, in writing, from the person organising the service. A church name alone is workable here. A funeral home name with no street is not, because the chapels serving Edison sit across four municipalities and several of them share a surname with a chapel twenty minutes away.

Cemeteries are the fixed points, and Edison families use six of them heavily. The churchyard at St. James Episcopal on Woodbridge Avenue is the historic one, small and inside the township. St. Gertrude Cemetery on Inman Avenue in Colonia is the large Diocese of Metuchen ground on this side of Middlesex County, and Vintagenouveau Florist works out of 299 Inman Ave further along that road, 6.8 miles from the centroid. Franklin Memorial Park lies south on Route 27 in North Brunswick, a straight run down the same Lincoln Highway line that passes through Edison. Alpine Cemetery in Perth Amboy takes a steady share of families from the southern sections, and Jacqueline's Florist at 369 Bordentown Ave in South Amboy, 7.4 miles out, is the nearest bench on that side. For Jewish families in the township, the two burial grounds in routine use are Beth Israel Cemetery in Woodbridge and Mount Lebanon Cemetery in Iselin — both minutes from Edison's eastern edge. Name the ground, add the plot or section if the family has it, and tell us what hour the burial is called for; that alone is enough to route a graveside piece correctly even with no chapel address at all.