Sympathy flowers in Ewing

The chapels an Ewing family actually uses are spread across Mercer County rather than concentrated in the township. North, up Route 31, Wilson-Apple Funeral Home on Pennington Road and Blackwell Memorial Home on North Main Street serve the Pennington and Hopewell Valley end — the families whose addresses read Ewing but whose church and cemetery are up the hill. East on Route 206 sits Poulson & Van Hise Funeral Directors on Lawrence Road in Lawrenceville. South in the city, Kimble Funeral Home on Hamilton Avenue handles a large share of Trenton and the Ewing streets that share Trenton's ZIP codes. And in Princeton, Mather-Hodge Funeral Home on Vandeventer Avenue covers the university end of the county. Each of those is a different drive on a different corridor, and the practical difference for us is the drop deadline, not the distance: most Mercer County chapels want an arrangement on the floor before the first viewing opens, and the county's viewing pattern is commonly an afternoon window and an evening window on the same day, with the Mass or service the following morning. Give us the chapel name, the decedent's surname and the time the viewing opens — the surname matters more than the address, because a chapel running two services needs to know which room the piece belongs in.

Two local situations come up often enough to plan for. The first is Washington Crossing National Cemetery on Highland Road in Newtown, the Bucks County national cemetery a short run from Ewing across the Scudder Falls crossing, and the resting place of a lot of Mercer County veterans; the state's Brigadier General William C. Doyle Veterans Memorial Cemetery at Wrightstown, New Jersey plays the same role on this side. Both work differently from a private cemetery and the difference catches families out. A national-cemetery committal happens in a committal shelter, not at the graveside; the interment itself occurs afterward, often hours later, with no family present; and both grounds run posted rules about what may be left on a grave and when it is removed. Flowers do not go to the shelter. Send them to the home, or ask the funeral director to carry a piece from the chapel service. The second situation is the care-building death rather than the hospital one — Greenwood House on Walter Street here in Ewing, Morris Hall in Lawrenceville, St. Lawrence Rehabilitation Center on Lawrenceville Road. When the loss happens in one of those buildings, the sympathy send is frequently to the staff as much as the family, and it goes to a front desk with a unit name on it. And if the family is one of the Jewish households this end of the county is home to, ask before you send: flowers are not the convention, a donation or a food tray usually is, and a plant delivered to the shiva house is the version that lands well.