Sympathy flowers in Hasbrouck Heights

The hard part of organising a funeral from Hasbrouck Heights is the five miles at the bottom of the hill. The borough sits on a bluff above the Hackensack Meadowlands, and the Catholic ground that most families here use is on the far side of them: Holy Cross Cemetery at 340 Ridge Road in North Arlington, the Archdiocese of Newark's large cemetery for this stretch of the county. Because Hasbrouck Heights is in Bergen County, its parish — Corpus Christi — belongs to Newark rather than to the Diocese of Paterson across the Passaic, so the chapel, the Mass and the burial are usually all inside one archdiocese. What splits the day is not church jurisdiction but the marsh. The route drops off the hill onto Route 17 south, threads the interchange where Route 46 and Interstate 80 come together, crosses the meadows and picks up Ridge Road through Lyndhurst into North Arlington. On a weekday morning that is a twenty-minute drive that becomes forty without warning. A cortege can absorb that; a flower van cannot, which is why an arrangement for a service out of this borough goes into position the afternoon before and is already there when the room opens, instead of chasing the day it is needed. One shop sits directly on that road: Flowers Bychuck at 469 Ridge Road in Lyndhurst, on the same street that becomes Holy Cross's own address a few minutes south.

Not every family goes that way. George Washington Memorial Park in Paramus takes a large share of the non-sectarian burials from this part of Bergen County, and the Jewish cemeteries in Paramus serve a wide radius around it. East, over the Hackensack River and up onto the Palisades, are Madonna Cemetery in Fort Lee and Fairview Cemetery above the Hudson; north is Maryrest in Mahwah; south into Hudson County, Holy Name Cemetery in Jersey City. West across the Passaic, families with Paterson and Clifton roots use Cedar Lawn Cemetery and East Ridgelawn Cemetery. That spread is why we ask for the cemetery by name rather than by town: three of those grounds are reachable from 07604 in twenty minutes and three of them are not, and a graveside piece that has to be set out before a procession arrives is the one delivery in this whole catalogue with no second chance. Funeral homes we deliberately do not list. This borough and the towns pressed against it — Lodi, Wood-Ridge, Wallington, Garfield, Hackensack, South Hackensack, Moonachie, Carlstadt, Rutherford, Lyndhurst — hold a great many family-run homes, they change hands, and a page that guessed at their names and streets would be worse than useless to someone holding a death certificate. Type the home's name, its street and the hour the doors open into the order, and the shop rings the director to ask where that particular room wants the piece set. Directors expect the call; it is the ordinary way this gets done.