Sympathy flowers in El Monte

El Monte's own dead are in Rosemead. Savannah Memorial Park, on East Valley Boulevard a short drive west of the city line, is the oldest cemetery in the San Gabriel Valley and holds the pioneer families of the settlement that grew up here at the end of the Santa Fe Trail — the people the street names came from. It matters practically, not just historically, because Savannah is the opposite of everything else in this valley: a small, walkable ground where a surname on a marker is a findable instruction and nobody needs a section map. If your flowers are going there, the order is simple — the name on the stone, the time somebody will be standing at it, and a mobile number. Almost every other El Monte service finishes somewhere far larger. Rose Hills Memorial Park, up on the hill above Workman Mill Road in Whittier, takes more of them than anywhere else; from 91732 the drive is Durfee Avenue south across the Whittier Narrows or the 605 down to the 60, twenty minutes on a good morning and considerably more on a Saturday. For a Catholic burial the ground is more often Resurrection, on Potrero Grande Drive off Garvey in Monterey Park, or Queen of Heaven, out beyond Walnut in Rowland Heights. North of the city, San Gabriel Cemetery sits on Roses Road and Live Oak Memorial Park on East Duarte Road in Monrovia; to the east, Forest Lawn Covina Hills and Oakdale Memorial Park in Glendora close the arc. Anywhere on that scale, a street address is not a delivery instruction. What a driver can use is the chapel name, or the lawn section and the lot number.

El Monte's households change the shape of this work in a way the surrounding cities do not. This is a city where the Mexican-American and the Chinese and Vietnamese communities live on the same blocks, and the two traditions send flowers to opposite ends of the same week. For many Catholic families here the evening before the funeral is the one that matters and the flowers belong at the chapel where the rosary is said or at the family's house. For many Chinese and Vietnamese families the large standing wreath with its banner is ordered through the mortuary itself as part of the service, which means what you want from us is the piece for the family's home or for the reception afterwards — a smaller, well-built arrangement someone will actually carry inside. Ask before you assume, and be careful in the other direction too: a bouquet built on white or yellow chrysanthemums reads instantly as a funeral flower in half the households in 91731 and 91732, which is exactly right this week and exactly wrong at a birthday next month. Cards are set exactly as you type them, accents and all — *Descanse en paz*, a surname carrying the tilde it is supposed to carry — and nothing gets translated on the way through. If the message needs to be hand-lettered in Chinese or Vietnamese, phone the bench before ordering rather than hoping.