Where are Harrison funerals actually held?
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Outside the town, which surprises people ordering from a distance. The densest cluster is a mile north on Belgrove Drive in Kearny, where Armitage & Wiggins Funeral Home and Thiele-Reid Family Funeral Home sit almost facing each other and handle a large part of the traffic for this stretch of the Passaic. The second is across the Jackson Street Bridge in Newark's Ironbound, whose Portuguese-language homes serve much of Harrison's Portuguese, Brazilian, Ecuadorian and Peruvian population. Never infer the chapel from the family's home address. Read the notice or ask a cousin, then put the chapel's name and the service hour into the order in place of a street number.
There is no cemetery in Harrison. Where does the burial end up?
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North or west, nearly always. The single most frequent destination out of this town is Holy Cross Cemetery in North Arlington, the Archdiocese of Newark's principal burial ground, approached up Ridge Road through Kearny — the same road Flowers Bychuck works from in Lyndhurst. Arlington Cemetery on Schuyler Avenue in Kearny takes much of the remainder, and over the river Fairmount Cemetery and Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Newark, along with Holy Sepulchre in East Orange, all sit inside the radius these shops cover. Each will accept a delivery against a confirmed committal hour. Read the next answer before you ask for one, though, because usually you should not.
Should the arrangement go straight to the graveside?
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We can do it and you should rarely want it. A committal slips by fifteen or twenty minutes as a matter of routine, a driver has a route behind him and cannot idle at a gate, and Holy Cross is large enough that a piece set down near the wrong section is simply lost. The dependable route is to send everything to the chapel and let the funeral director carry it out with the rest — that is how directors expect the morning to work and what their vehicles are set up for. The one genuine exception is a committal with no chapel service ahead of it and a time the family has fixed. Write that time into the order and the shop will telephone the cemetery office before building.
How far ahead of the service does the order have to go in?
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Far enough that the room is dressed before the doors open, which is earlier than the cutoff suggests. For a morning Mass, order the afternoon before. For an evening viewing, order by mid-morning at the latest. Harrison families often receive in two blocks with the building locked in between, and an arrangement landing inside that gap has nobody to take it. If you have only learned about tomorrow's service this evening, place the order tonight anyway and type the service hour into the notes; the shop rings the funeral home the moment it opens and works backwards from what the director tells it, which is a far better plan than pushing an order into the same-day queue and hoping.
There is no local grave — the family is sending him home to Ecuador.
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Then send for one evening and one room, and write that into the order so the shop builds accordingly. A good number of Harrison households repatriate: the viewing happens here, the burial happens abroad, and a floral piece therefore has a working life of a few hours on a table beside the register book rather than a day outdoors beside a plot. A weighted vessel that stands up on its own is the right object. Afterwards, the gift that actually helps is a plant sent to the apartment, because the hard fortnight is not the week of the viewing but the one after it, when the visiting stops. Give us the home address for that second delivery.
The death happened at University Hospital. Do I send flowers there?
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No — they will not find them. Beds are needed and relatives are out of 150 Bergen Street within hours, long before anything ordered today could arrive, and in Harrison they will be at a Kearny or Ironbound chapel inside a day or two. Send there instead, or to the apartment. The same applies at Newark Beth Israel on Lyons Avenue, at Clara Maass in Belleville and at Jersey City Medical Center. If what you want is to thank the team who looked after somebody, that is a different order: address it to the named unit rather than to a patient, ask for it unscented and free of lilies, and expect it to live on a staff counter rather than in anybody's room.
I am in another state and all I have is that the family lives in Harrison.
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That is a workable start, and this town generates a great many such orders, because Harrison families are scattered across other states and other countries to an unusual degree. What finishes the order is the chapel name, the name of the person who died, and the hour of the service. Do not lean on the ZIP by itself: 07029 also covers the borough of East Newark, and an entirely separate Harrison Township exists down in Gloucester County. Write the town out. The shop copies your card message out by hand, and you get an email when the piece has been set down. If you suspect flowers may not fit the family's custom, say so in the notes and the shop will raise it with the director first.