Sympathy flowers in Saratoga

The clock that matters for a sympathy order is the one in the chapel, not the one on our cutoff. A funeral director or a church office will name the hour arrangements have to be standing in the room — commonly an hour or two before a viewing opens, and earlier for a morning Mass — and everything else is worked backward from that. In Saratoga there is a wrinkle worth knowing before you order: the burial ground is in town and the funeral home is not. Madronia Cemetery occupies a block of Oak Street just below Big Basin Way, has been in use since the 1850s, and holds a great many of the families whose names are on the town's streets and schools. It is a small, old, tree-covered ground on a residential street beside Saratoga Elementary, not a campus with a lobby, so a graveside delivery there is coordinated through the funeral director rather than through a receiving desk. There is no mortuary inside the city limits, which means the chapel service and the committal are usually in two different cities on the same morning.

Church services run at a short list of Saratoga addresses. Sacred Heart Catholic Church is on Saratoga Avenue and handles the parish's funeral Masses; Saint Andrew's Episcopal Church sits further along the same street; Saratoga Federated Church is on Park Place near the Village, and next to it the Foothill Club — the 1915 clubhouse designed by Julia Morgan — is where a good number of Saratoga memorial receptions are actually held, which is a different delivery problem from a chapel because it is a rental hall with a caretaker rather than a staffed mortuary. Two more Saratoga addresses come up constantly in this occasion and are easy to overlook: the Saratoga Retirement Community on Fruitvale Avenue and Our Lady of Fatima Villa on Saratoga-Los Gatos Road. A death frequently happens at one of them, and for weeks afterward the surviving spouse or the staff who cared for the person are the people an arrangement should reach.

The chapels and the rest of the cemeteries are below the hill. Darling & Fischer's Campbell Memorial Chapel on East Campbell Avenue and its Chapel of the Hills on North Santa Cruz Avenue in Los Gatos are the two nearest funeral homes to Saratoga; Oak Hill Funeral Home shares its Curtner Avenue grounds in San Jose with Oak Hill Memorial Park, which has been taking burials since the 1830s and is the state's oldest secular cemetery; Lima Family Santa Clara Mortuary is on North Winchester Boulevard; Spangler Mortuaries is on South San Antonio Road in Los Altos; and Cusimano Family Colonial Mortuary is on West El Camino Real in Mountain View. For interment the usual grounds beyond Madronia are Los Gatos Memorial Park on Los Gatos-Almaden Road, Gate of Heaven Catholic Cemetery on Cristo Rey Drive in Los Altos, which serves the Diocese of San Jose, Santa Clara Mission Cemetery on Lincoln Street, and Calvary Catholic Cemetery on Madden Avenue. For any of those, a driver needs the section or committal-shelter name and the funeral director's name along with the hour — grounds staff cannot guess which canopy is which on a morning with three services.