Sympathy flowers in Harrisburg

Sympathy is the one occasion where the clock is not yours. A Harrisburg family typically publishes the obituary on a Tuesday for a Thursday viewing and a Friday service, and everything you send has to land inside windows that somebody else set. The one mercy of this particular city is that the chapels are close together and the geography is compact: nearly every funeral home a Harrisburg order needs to reach sits within about fifteen minutes of the four shops in our network. Hetrick-Bitner Funeral Home is on Walnut Street on the city's east side. Malpezzi Funeral Home serves the uptown and North Second Street side. Neill Funeral Home keeps chapels on Linglestown Road in Harrisburg and on Market Street in Camp Hill, which straddles the river for families split between the East and West Shores. Across the Susquehanna, Parthemore Funeral Home & Cremation Services is in New Cumberland and Musselman Funeral Home is in Lemoyne. East toward Hershey, Trefz & Bowser Funeral Home is on West Main Street in Hummelstown — the same block as one of our shops — and Hoover Funeral Homes & Crematory serves the Hershey side. In Middletown, Frank E. Matinchek and Daughter Funeral Home handles most of the borough. The services themselves fan out across the parishes and congregations: Saint Patrick Cathedral at 212 State Street, seat of the Catholic Diocese of Harrisburg, Market Square Presbyterian Church on Market Square, Pine Street Presbyterian on North 3rd, Zion Lutheran, Bethel AME, Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Middletown, and the historically Black congregations of Allison Hill and Uptown. Harrisburg's Jewish community — Temple Ohev Sholom and Beth El Temple on North Front Street, Kesher Israel and Chisuk Emuna — follows the convention where flowers are not sent to the service; a plant to the shiva home, or a charitable gift, is the correct gesture, and that distinction is worth checking before you order rather than after.

Two practical matters decide whether a sympathy order actually helps, and neither has anything to do with the flowers. The first is what the chapel needs from you. Funeral homes file deliveries by the surname of the deceased, not by the sender's name and not by the recipient's, so an order addressed only to a widow at a chapel address can sit unmatched in a back room while the viewing runs. Give the chapel name, the town, the full name of the person who died, and the date and time of the viewing or service. If the family has asked that arrangements go to the house instead — common in Harrisburg, where many families gather at a relative's home in Paxtang, Colonial Park, Camp Hill or one of the boroughs rather than at the chapel — send there and say so in the notes. The second matter is timing, and here the instinct most people have is wrong. Everything arrives at once. A family in the Susquehanna Valley will get every arrangement they are going to receive inside a seventy-two-hour window, and then the house goes quiet. The week after the service is when the casseroles stop, the out-of-town relatives drive home over the Market Street or Harvey Taylor bridge, and the person left behind is alone in the kitchen for the first time. A plant sent ten days later, to a porch in Penbrook or a row house in Midtown, lands in an empty week and is remembered far longer than one more arrangement in a crowded viewing room. The live Harrisburg catalogue is well suited to exactly that delivery. As for the card: write the name of the person who died, say one specific true thing about them, and stop. Anything that begins with an explanation of what the loss means is writing for yourself. Short is not cold — in this region, short is the local dialect of grief, and a single honest line signed with your full name is what gets kept.