Sympathy flowers in Metairie

The chapels here are lined up along two boulevards and one highway, which is why Jefferson Parish sympathy routing is fast once you name the building. Leitz-Eagan Funeral Home and Lamana-Panno-Fallo are both on Veterans Memorial Boulevard, the six-lane spine that runs the length of Metairie from the Orleans line to Kenner. Tharp-Sontheimer-Tharp is on North Causeway Boulevard, a few blocks off the I-10 interchange and the foot of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, which matters when family is driving down from Mandeville and Covington for a morning service. Muhleisen Funeral Home serves Metairie and Kenner. Garden of Memories on Airline Drive is both funeral home and cemetery on one set of grounds, so a service and an interment can happen without a procession leaving the property. Across the canal, Lake Lawn Metairie on Pontchartrain Boulevard, Jacob Schoen & Son on Canal Street and Greenwood on Canal Boulevard are all inside the radius, as are Mothe Funeral Homes in Harvey and Marrero and Westlawn in Gretna on the West Bank, though a West Bank drop adds a bridge crossing to the drive and should be ordered earlier in the day. Deliveries go to the chapel before the doors open for visitation — never during the service, when no staff member is free to receive anything.

Timing trips up more senders than anything else, and the local sequence is consistent enough to plan around. A Jefferson Parish Catholic funeral usually runs as an evening visitation with a Rosary the night before, a funeral Mass the next morning, then the interment, then a repast at a family home or a parish hall. Flowers need to be standing in the room before that first visitation window opens, which in practice means a delivery the day before the service, not the morning of. If the Mass is at a parish church rather than at the funeral home — St. Catherine of Siena near Bonnabel Boulevard, St. Francis Xavier on Metairie Road, St. Ann Church and Shrine, St. Clement of Rome, St. Angela Merici or St. Philip Neri — the parish office is the authority on what may be placed near the altar and when the church is unlocked, and the answer differs by parish and by pastor. Ask the funeral director to make that call for you; they do it every week. For Jewish families at the West Esplanade Avenue congregations — Gates of Prayer, Congregation Beth Israel, which relocated to Metairie after Katrina, and Shir Chadash — flowers are generally not part of the service. A green plant or a tray of food carried to the home where callers are being received does the work instead, and the burial itself is usually at one of the congregations' cemeteries across the canal in Orleans Parish.