Sympathy flowers in Hawthorne

Sympathy is the one occasion where a Hawthorne order is usually driven by an hour rather than a day, and the first useful fact is that the borough has a funeral home on its own main street. Browning-Forshay Funeral Home sits on Lafayette Avenue, a few doors along the same commercial stretch where Tiffany's Florists works at number 562 — a coincidence of geography, not an arrangement between them, but it means an in-borough sympathy delivery can be a walk rather than a drive. Outside the borough line, the chapel ring Hawthorne families actually use runs in three directions: north to the Vander Plaat home on Godwin Avenue in Wyckoff for the Bergen County side of a family, south into Paterson, where Hawthorne sits inside the Roman Catholic Diocese of Paterson and the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist on Grand Street is the seat, and east across the Passaic River to Fair Lawn, where Louis Suburban Chapel on Broadway serves the large Jewish community that begins immediately on the far bank. The burials themselves concentrate in a tight set of grounds. Cedar Lawn Cemetery on McLean Boulevard in Paterson is the historic one — Garret Hobart, the Paterson lawyer who became Vice President under McKinley, is buried there — and Holy Sepulchre and Laurel Grove Memorial Park, both in Totowa, take most of the Catholic and non-denominational services from this side of the county. North and east the grounds are George Washington Memorial Park on the Paramus side, Valleau in Ridgewood and Maryrest up in Mahwah. From a Hawthorne address, none of those is more than a twenty-minute drive outside rush hour, which is exactly why the timing question is answerable at all.