Sympathy flowers in Evansville

The second thing is the address, and here Evansville has a specific trap. The names people say — Ziemer, Alexander, Boone, Browning, Pierre, Sunset — are family firms, and several of them run more than one chapel on opposite sides of town. Ziemer Funeral Home keeps a north chapel up on North First Avenue and an east chapel over on Hebron Avenue. Alexander Funeral Homes has an east chapel on North Green River Road and a west chapel out on West Mount Pleasant Road. Browning Funeral Home sits on Diamond Avenue; Sunset Funeral Home is out on St. George Road with Sunset Memorial Park adjoining it; Pierre Funeral Home works the West Side; Boone Funeral Home works the east. So a relative telling you *it's at Ziemer* has given you a firm, not a location, and a driver sent to the wrong chapel loses an hour of a window that did not have one to spare. The fix takes thirty seconds: the obituary in the Evansville Courier & Press carries the exact chapel and street, and it is the one source everyone in this city is already reading. Copy the street address into the order and the rest of it looks after itself.

Where the service itself happens changes what the shop builds. Evansville is the seat of a Catholic diocese, and a funeral Mass at St. Benedict Cathedral on Lincoln Avenue follows a different rhythm from a chapel service — the flowers usually stand at the funeral home through the visitation, then a smaller number travel on to the church, then to the cemetery. The West Side's German Catholic history is still visible in its parishes, St. Boniface among them, and in the fact that a West Side family will often hold visitation near Franklin Street and bury across town. Holy Rosary draws from the east and north sides. Near downtown, Liberty Baptist Church anchors one of the city's oldest congregations, and services there run to their own order of things. The congregation at Temple Adath B'nai Israel on Washington Avenue has its own expectations about what belongs at a service and what belongs at a house afterward — tell us the congregation rather than guessing, and the shop will telephone before it cuts anything. On the cemetery side, Oak Hill Cemetery on East Virginia Street is the city's large historic burying ground, with Locust Hill, the Catholic St. Joseph Cemetery out toward Mesker Park, and Sunset Memorial Park on St. George Road carrying much of the rest. Ask the funeral director which pieces travel to the graveside, because in most cases only some of them do and the family does not want to be deciding that at the cemetery gate.

Then there is the river, which shapes sympathy here more than it shapes anything else. Evansville sits on the outside of a long northward bend in the Ohio, and Henderson, Kentucky is fourteen miles south across the US 41 twin bridges — close enough that families straddle the line as a matter of course. Somebody dies in an Evansville hospital and is buried in Henderson County; somebody spends their life in Robards or Spottsville and has the visitation on this side because that is where the children live. When the service is south of the river, Shaw's Flowers Inc at 423 2nd Street in downtown Henderson is the near bench and the piece never has to cross the bridges at all — which matters, because the twin bridges are the only crossing for miles and a backup there is not something a driver can route around. When the service is north of it, the Indiana benches handle it. North and east, the widened 60-mile radius takes in Newburgh and Chandler and Boonville in Warrick County, Mount Vernon and Poseyville and New Harmony in Posey, Princeton, Fort Branch and Haubstadt up in Gibson, and out along the river Rockport and Tell City. Jasper, Vincennes and Owensboro sit near the edge, which sets timing rather than price: a chapel forty-five minutes out wants a morning order, and a late-day order for that distance is realistically next-day.