Sympathy flowers in Palo Alto

Palo Alto has one cemetery, and it decides the shape of most sympathy orders in this city. Alta Mesa Memorial Park occupies the long block at 695 Arastradero Road, up against the Foothill Expressway side of town, with its own funeral home on the grounds — which means a family can hold the service and the burial at a single address, and a great many do. Outsiders know Alta Mesa mainly because Steve Jobs is buried there in an unmarked plot; locals know it as the place where four generations of Palo Alto families are in the ground, and where a graveside piece has to stand up on its own in the open on a lawn rather than lean against a chapel wall. Practical consequences follow from that. Graveside deliveries want a section or plot reference and, far more importantly, the service time, because the arrangement needs to be standing before the family arrives and not carried past them. Arastradero is also a road that changed: the bike-lane reconfiguration narrowed it, and a Friday-morning approach from El Camino Real runs slower than the map suggests, so morning-of deliveries to Alta Mesa get built the night before and go out early.

The congregations matter as much as the chapels, and they are specific rather than generic. All Saints' Episcopal on Waverley Street, First Presbyterian on Cowper Street and First Congregational on Louis Road host memorial services regularly, and all three sit on streets where a hearse and a florist van are competing for the same twenty feet of curb. The Catholic services run through St. Thomas Aquinas Parish, whose three churches — the Waverley Street church downtown, Our Lady of the Rosary on Cowper, St. Albert the Great on Channing Avenue — are scheduled tightly enough that a delivery an hour early is the only safe delivery. University AME Zion Church on Middlefield Road anchors a congregation older than most of the city around it. The Palo Alto Buddhist Temple on Louis Road observes the forty-ninth-day memorial as well as the funeral itself, which is the single most-missed timing in this market: the family who declined flowers in the first week is often the family for whom something arriving at the seven-week mark lands hardest.

Jewish practice on this stretch of the Peninsula is concentrated and worth planning around rather than guessing at. Congregation Kol Emeth on Manuela Avenue and Congregation Etz Chayim on Alma Street are in Palo Alto itself; Congregation Beth Am is a few minutes up Arastradero Road in Los Altos Hills. Burials are prompt, often within a day or two, which collapses the window for anything ordered from out of state, and flowers are frequently not part of the service at all. What works instead is a delivery to the house during the week of mourning — a plant or a low arrangement that sits on a kitchen counter while people come and go, sent to a street address in Old Palo Alto, Green Gables, Charleston Meadows or Barron Park rather than to a chapel. If you are unsure, ask the family or the funeral director whether flowers are welcome and where; nobody has ever been offended by that question, and it is a better use of a phone call than guessing at a tradition.