Sympathy flowers in Latham

The oldest grave in Latham's neighborhood belongs to a woman who founded a religion. The Shaker burial ground on Albany Shaker Road, a few minutes from Latham Circle beside Albany International Airport, holds Mother Ann Lee and the first Shaker settlement in America — the Watervliet Shaker site, with its 1848 meeting house still standing. Families here drive past it on the way to a flight without registering what it is. It matters on this page for one reason: burial ground in the Town of Colonie is scattered and specific rather than gathered into one municipal cemetery, and a sympathy piece routed to the wrong gate arrives at a locked gate. The ground most Latham services actually use is Memory Gardens on Watervliet Shaker Road, minutes from the hamlet, with Our Lady of Angels Cemetery in Menands taking many Catholic interments. South of that, on the bluff above the Hudson, Saint Agnes Cemetery and Albany Rural Cemetery share the Menands approach off Broadway. East across the river is Oakwood Cemetery in Troy; west is Vale Cemetery in Schenectady. All of those sit inside the 18-mile live radius drawn from 12110, and a committal piece for any of them has to be standing before the procession arrives rather than travelling behind it.

Latham's own funeral home is Dufresne & Cavanaugh on Old Loudon Road, and for a great many families in 12110 the whole sequence — calling hours, service, procession — begins there. Flowers for an evening viewing want a morning order, because a piece built at noon still has to be conditioned before it moves, and Old Loudon Road at half past four is feeding the Northway. Beyond the hamlet, the homes a Latham family is most likely to name are New Comer Cremations & Funerals on Washington Avenue Extension at the Colonie end, McVeigh Funeral Home on North Allen Street and Hans Funeral Home at 1088 Western Avenue in Albany's upper-Western corridor, Daniel Keenan Funeral Home over on Delaware Avenue, Applebee Funeral Home in Delmar for Bethlehem families, and Daly Funeral Home in Schenectady, which sits close to two of the deepest-rated shops on this page. Levine Memorial Chapel on Washington Avenue handles the region's Jewish services, where chapel flowers are generally not what a family expects; the gesture that fits is a plant sent to the shiva home in Loudonville, Niskayuna or Delmar, or a donation made in the deceased's memory. Name which of the two you mean when you order, and the shop works to that instead of improvising.

Two shifts in how Capital Region families handle a death are worth knowing before you order. The first is cremation, which now carries a large share of services here and rearranges the whole timetable. Instead of calling hours on Tuesday and a burial Wednesday, a family may hold a memorial gathering weeks later, or nothing formal at all — and the flowers that would once have gone to a chapel do more good sent to the house in the first week, after the casseroles stop and everyone else goes back to work. If you do not know whether there is a service, send to the home and say as much on the card. The second is that a funeral Mass and a calling hour are two different deliveries with two different clocks. Latham's Catholic families are served by St. Ambrose and Our Lady of the Assumption inside the hamlet, while a diocesan funeral of any scale goes to the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception on Eagle Street in Albany, a block off the Capitol, where a weekday Mass competes with state-government parking. Greek Orthodox services run through St. Sophia on Whitehall Road, with the forty-day and one-year remembrances afterward that most senders never think to mark. Churches generally want an arrangement inside a tight window before the service and will not store one overnight; a funeral home will happily hold a morning delivery for an evening viewing. Knowing which of the two you are sending to sets the delivery hour more than the street address does. And afterwards the flowers nearly always leave with the family — back to the house, or out to Memory Gardens or the Menands hill with the burial party — which is one more reason to ask for something built to travel rather than something built to stand.