Sympathy flowers in San Rafael

Two burial grounds sit inside San Rafael's own city limits, which is unusual for a city of sixty thousand and useful to know when you are trying to work out where flowers should go. Mount Tamalpais Cemetery and Mortuary at 2500 Fifth Avenue is a cemetery and a funeral home on one property at the western end of Fifth, so a family can hold the service and the committal in the same place on the same morning — which means a standing piece and a graveside piece are often ordered together and delivered on one run. Mount Olivet, on Los Ranchitos Road, is the Catholic ground on this side of the Golden Gate, up behind the 101 corridor, and it serves parishes across Marin rather than one congregation. Outside the city, Fernwood on Tennessee Valley Road in Mill Valley is the natural-burial property, where shrouds, unpolished markers and no embalming are the norm and floral conventions run toward loose, seasonal, foliage-heavy work rather than wired formality. Valley Memorial Park in Novato covers the north county. Then the fact that surprises out-of-town senders most: a very large number of Marin families still hold the service here and bury in Colma, the cemetery town below San Francisco — Holy Cross for Catholic families, Cypress Lawn, Olivet, the Jewish grounds — while veterans' families often go to Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno. That is a service in Marin and an interment forty-five minutes to an hour south through the city or around the bay, and the flowers have to be split accordingly.

What the pieces are, and which one you actually want. A standing spray on an easel is chapel furniture: it is built to be seen from six rows back, it goes where the funeral director puts it, and it is the right answer when you are one of many senders and the family has a chapel to fill. A casket piece is family-only — if you are not immediate family, do not order one, because a second one arriving is an awkwardness the director has to solve quietly. Altar or ambo arrangements are the church's request rather than yours: if the Mass is at St. Raphael on Fifth Avenue, the parish attached to Mission San Rafael Arcángel and the oldest continuous congregation in the county, or at St. Isabella in Terra Linda, ask the parish office what they want beside the altar before you order anything tall, because several Marin parishes limit what may be placed there and remove the rest. A home arrangement or a plant is the piece almost nobody orders and everybody remembers, because it arrives at the house in the week after the service, when the casseroles have stopped and the visitors have gone back to work. If the family are Rodef Sholom congregants on North San Pedro Road or Kol Shofar members over in Tiburon, a plant or a food gift to the shiva house is the appropriate gesture and flowers at the chapel usually are not — ask, or ask us to ask.