Sympathy flowers in Kirkland

Then comes the geography that trips up out-of-town senders: there is no large burial ground inside Kirkland. Whatever the family decides, the cars leave the city, and the direction tells you which bench should take the order. Head north up Juanita Drive NE onto SR-522 and you reach Acacia Memorial Park and Funeral Home, whose 14951 Bothell Way NE address is actually in Lake Forest Park; it handles a steady share of north-end committals. Catholic families from this side of the lake mostly finish at Holyrood Cemetery in Shoreline, off Ballinger Way, and the large Aurora Avenue North ground, Evergreen Washelli, takes the north Seattle services. South over I-405 lies the Eastside's principal memorial park, Sunset Hills in Bellevue, a straight run down the freeway and the ground a great many Eastside families have used for generations. Straight east, where NE 85th Street becomes Redmond Way, Cedar Lawns Memorial Park serves families rooted on the Sammamish valley side. At the outer edges sit Purdy and Walters at Floral Hills in Lynnwood, Flintoft's Funeral Home in Issaquah and Greenwood Memorial Park in Renton. Ask the family which one before you order: guess wrong and an arrangement spends the morning it was needed driving twenty miles in the opposite direction.

Kirkland holds a lot of its farewells in rooms that were never built for them, and that changes what you should order. Washington cremates a larger share of its dead than almost any state and was the first to legalise natural organic reduction, so the gathering here is commonly a celebration of life set weeks after the death — in a church hall, the community room at the Peter Kirk Community Center on Kirkland Avenue, the pavilion at Marina Park, a booked meeting room at The Heathman or The Woodmark, a clubhouse up in Kingsgate, or a Woodinville tasting room a few miles east. Ashes go onto Lake Washington from boats leaving the gated docks at Carillon Point and Yarrow Bay Marina, and for those, loose stems the family can carry aboard beat anything mounted on a frame. Two questions settle the order for every one of these rooms: what surface will the flowers sit on, and when does the door open. A tripod piece in a low-ceilinged community room reads as furniture in the way; a table arrangement next to a framed photograph reads as care, and a matched pair bracketing the entrance does more work than one big piece parked in a corner.