Sympathy flowers in Perth Amboy

Most American sympathy guides assume the funeral and the burial happen in the same county. In Perth Amboy that assumption is often wrong, and getting it wrong wastes the gesture. Roughly three quarters of the city is Hispanic — Dominican, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Central American — and a substantial share of deaths here end with a viewing in New Jersey and an interment somewhere else entirely: a casket prepared locally and flown to Santo Domingo, San Juan, Puebla or Guatemala City for burial with family. When that is the arrangement, the local piece has one job and one window. It stands in a funeral home room on the one or two evenings the family receives visitors, and then it stays behind. Nothing travels with the casket. So the first thing to establish, from the family or the funeral director, is whether there is a New Jersey burial at all. If there is not, send something to the viewing and something else, later, to the household that is left here — which is where the grief actually lives for the following month. If there is, you have a second address and a second deadline to plan for.

The local geography of a funeral here is compact and specific. Perth Amboy's own funeral homes sit in the residential blocks rather than on Smith Street — Gustav J. Novak Funeral Home on Barclay Street and Mitruska Funeral Home on Amboy Avenue are two long-standing city addresses — and families also use chapels just over the line where they have buried for generations, including Flynn & Son on Ford Avenue in Fords and the firms along the Woodbridge and South Amboy sides. Because several of these are family businesses with more than one location, always give the chapel's own street rather than only the town: an arrangement sent to the wrong branch on the morning of a service cannot be recovered. The religious center of gravity is the Roman Catholic Diocese of Metuchen, whose cathedral sits in Metuchen a short drive north, and whose Perth Amboy parishes run Spanish-language funeral Masses as a matter of course. Older Hungarian, Polish, Slovak, Ukrainian and Danish families — the community that gave the Budapest section its name — are buried out of the same parishes. And St. Peter's Episcopal Church on Rector Street, the oldest Episcopal congregation in New Jersey, has a churchyard in the middle of the city that predates almost everything around it.

For a New Jersey burial the cemetery is usually one of a short list, and each has its own office hours and its own rules about what may be left at a grave. Alpine Cemetery on Convery Boulevard is the large non-sectarian ground inside the city itself, minutes from any Perth Amboy chapel. On the Catholic side the Diocese of Metuchen operates St. Gertrude Cemetery on Inman Avenue in Colonia, roughly six miles up — the same Inman Avenue that Vintagenouveau Florist works from — along with Holy Cross Burial Park in Jamesburg and Resurrection Burial Park in Piscataway. Cloverleaf Memorial Park sits on Route 1 in Woodbridge, Beth Israel Cemetery serves Jewish families on the Woodbridge side, Rosehill Cemetery is up in Linden, and Resurrection Cemetery is across the Outerbridge Crossing on Staten Island, which is a genuinely short drive from the east end of this city. The practical caution is the same everywhere: cemeteries do not hold flowers for a committal that has not happened, and most restrict what can stand at a grave between visits. The normal route is chapel first, with the pieces travelling in the procession. For a later remembrance visit — a birthday, an anniversary of the death — call the cemetery office before you order.