Sympathy flowers in Mountain View

Sympathy is the one occasion where the deadline is not ours. A service has a time, a viewing has a window, and an arrangement that arrives an hour late is worth almost nothing, so the first question on a Mountain View sympathy order is never the design — it is when and where the family will be. The city has one funeral home of its own, Cusimano Family Colonial Mortuary at 96 West El Camino Real in 94040, a few blocks from the Castro Street core, and it handles a large share of local services. Around it sits the rest of the mid-Peninsula circuit: Spangler Mortuaries on South San Antonio Road in Los Altos, Roller & Hapgood & Tinney on Middlefield Road in Palo Alto, the Darling & Fischer chapels in Campbell and San Jose, and Oak Hill Funeral Home on Curtner Avenue in San Jose. Chapels want flowers well before guests arrive — plan on the arrangement standing in the room at least ninety minutes ahead — and they want the decedent's full name on the card envelope, because a busy Saturday can have three services running through the same building.

Graveside work has its own geography here, and the destinations are mostly outside Mountain View's city limits. Gate of Heaven Cemetery on Cristo Rey Drive in Los Altos is the Catholic cemetery of the Diocese of San Jose and the interment site for a large share of Peninsula Catholic families. Alta Mesa Memorial Park on Arastradero Road in Palo Alto is the historic non-sectarian park closest to the city. Santa Clara Mission Cemetery on Lincoln Street, Oak Hill Memorial Park on Curtner Avenue — California's oldest secular cemetery — Los Gatos Memorial Park and Skylawn Memorial Park up on Highway 92 in the San Mateo hills round out the list, and veterans' interments often go north to Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno, which sits past the 18-mile same-day radius and needs a day's lead time rather than an afternoon's. Cemeteries are not addresses in the ordinary sense: the gate needs the service name and time, and often the section or chapel, to route a delivery to the right lawn.

Mountain View's sympathy work is unusually multi-tradition, and getting the tradition right matters more than getting the size right. Mountain View Buddhist Temple on North Shoreline Boulevard is a Jodo Shinshu temple with deep roots in the city's Japanese-American community, and Buddhist services there follow conventions a sender should know: white and pastel standing arrangements rather than bright mixed color, and *koden* — the condolence envelope — carrying at least as much weight as flowers. St. Joseph Catholic Church on Hope Street anchors the Catholic side of Old Mountain View, where a vigil the evening before and a funeral Mass the next morning is the usual shape, and standing sprays and rosary-appropriate designs are conventional. In Reform and Conservative Jewish practice — Congregation Beth Am on Arastradero Road in Los Altos Hills and Congregation Kol Emeth in Palo Alto — flowers are not customary at the funeral itself; a plant or a basket sent to the shiva home, or a donation in the deceased's name, is what the family expects. Chinese families across this city commonly use white and yellow chrysanthemum and avoid red entirely. Hindu families more often want garlands of marigold, jasmine or rose than a vase arrangement, and the timeline is compressed because cremation frequently happens within a day or two. At the Sikh Gurdwara on Murillo Avenue in San Jose and the Muslim Community Association on Scott Boulevard in Santa Clara, flowers are usually not part of the rite at all, and a sender is better served asking the family than guessing.

Two practical Mountain View notes for the days before a service. The first concerns the hospital and hospice end of this occasion, which is where a lot of sympathy orders actually begin: El Camino Health on Grant Road in 94040 is the local hospital and the closest palliative destination; Stanford Hospital on Pasteur Drive and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital on Welch Road in Palo Alto, the VA Palo Alto campus on Miranda Avenue, Kaiser Santa Clara on Lawrence Expressway and Santa Clara Valley Medical Center carry the rest. Palliative and ICU floors differ on what they accept, several units take no soil-based plants at all, and a great many Mountain View families are in home hospice rather than in a hospital bed, which usually makes the house the better address. The second concerns traffic on service days: a Saturday morning funeral at Cusimano sits inside the same downtown grid as the Sunday farmers' market at the Caltrain lot and the pedestrian blocks of Castro Street, and a driver headed for Gate of Heaven or Alta Mesa crosses Foothill Expressway or Page Mill Road at the exact hour school traffic loads them. Morning-of deliveries to a chapel should be bought the day before, not at the cutoff.