Sympathy flowers in Gilbert

The first question to answer about a Gilbert funeral is not which florist but which building. A large share of services in this town are held in a Latter-day Saint ward meetinghouse rather than in a mortuary chapel, and that changes the logistics entirely. Gilbert has meetinghouses on quiet residential corners all over the grid, most of them unstaffed except on Sundays and locked until an hour or so before a service begins. Flowers sent to one at nine in the morning for an eleven o'clock funeral will sit in the sun by a side door unless somebody is expecting them. The workable version is to put the meetinghouse street address on the order along with the service hour and a mobile number for the family member or the funeral director handling setup, and to let the studio build the delivery window backward from the family prayer that precedes the service rather than from the service itself. One clarification worth making, because out-of-state senders get it wrong regularly: the Gilbert Arizona Temple at 3301 S Greenfield Road, dedicated in 2014 and visible from the Santan, is not where funerals are held. It is not a service venue, and flowers sent there will not reach a family. Send to the meetinghouse, the mortuary, or the house.

Gilbert itself has one cemetery and, historically, almost no mortuaries — the chapels that carry this town's volume sit in Mesa and Chandler, a short run up or across the grid. Gilbert Memorial Park on East Queen Creek Road is the town's own burial ground and the most common graveside address on this page. Northward, Bunker's Garden Chapel on North Centennial Way in Mesa and Bunker's University Chapel on East University Drive are two of the longest-established chapels in the East Valley; Mariposa Gardens Memorial Park and Funeral Care on South Power Road handles both service and burial on one site; Mountain View Funeral Home and Cemetery on East Main Street does the same on Mesa's east side; Lakeshore Mortuary sits on South Dobson; the City of Mesa Cemetery on North Center Street is the old municipal ground; and Queen of Heaven Cemetery and Mortuary on East Baseline Road is the Diocese of Phoenix's Catholic cemetery for this side of the Valley. To the south, Valley of the Sun Mortuary and Cemetery on East Chandler Heights Road serves the Chandler and Sun Lakes corridor. Veterans' families often ask about the National Memorial Cemetery of Arizona, which is well north of Phoenix and outside this 18-mile grid — order that one a day ahead rather than same-day. Whatever the venue, copy the name and street address straight off the obituary. Chapels change hands, and a viewing the night before is frequently at a different address from the service the next morning.

Custom decides what to send, and Gilbert holds several side by side. At a Latter-day Saint service, flowers are welcome and common — standing arrangements and baskets around the front of the chapel, and a casket spray arranged by the immediate family — but the cross is not used as a symbol in Latter-day Saint worship, so a cross form is the one shape to avoid unless the family specifically asks. At a Catholic funeral Mass, whether at St. Anne on East Elliot Road, St. Mary Magdalene on East Williams Field Road, or a Mesa parish, the full range applies: easel pieces, wreaths and cross forms for the church, a spray for the casket, and arrangements sent to the home afterward. Protestant and non-denominational services, of which the East Valley has many, take large expressive standing pieces and are the most permissive category. For a Jewish family — East Valley congregations, including Temple Beth Sholom of the East Valley in Chandler, generally look to Phoenix-area chapels for funerals — flowers at the service are typically not the convention and a charitable donation is; the gesture that lands is a plant or a fruit-and-flower arrangement sent to the shiva household during the week of mourning, addressed to the family rather than to a chapel. Two Arizona-specific factors cut across all of it. Cremation rates here are among the highest in the country, so a memorial service may be scheduled two or three weeks after the death to let out-of-state family fly in, which means the flowers are often not urgent at all. And many Gilbert households are transplants with no relatives in state, so the person who most needs something delivered is frequently the neighbor keeping the house running.