Sympathy flowers in Sharonville

Nobody who dies in Sharonville is buried in Sharonville. The grounds that serve this part of northern Hamilton County sit in a ring around the city instead: Rest Haven Memorial Park on Plainfield Road in Blue Ash about five miles southeast, Gate of Heaven on Montgomery Road in Montgomery about seven miles the same direction, Arlington Memorial Gardens above Compton Road in Mt. Healthy about seven miles west, and Spring Grove Cemetery and Arboretum — opened in 1845, a National Historic Landmark and among the largest burial grounds in the country — roughly nine miles southwest toward the river. Which of those appears in the obituary tells you more about where flowers should go than the family's home address does, because the chapel is usually chosen near the grave rather than near the house. So read the notice twice and copy the chapel name, the street and the town exactly as printed. There are funeral homes carrying the same surname in three different counties out here, and an arrangement delivered to the right company in the wrong town is the one mistake in this category that cannot be undone on the morning of a service.

Chapel geography from here spreads across three counties, and Sharonville families use all of it. Mueller Funeral Home on West Main Street in Mason is about eight miles north and carries much of the Warren County volume, with Baysore's Flowers at 301 Reading Rd. the nearest bench to it. Tufts Schildmeyer Family Funeral Home in Loveland is a similar distance east, with Jasminerose Florist on St. Rt. 28 a few minutes away. At the outer edge of the radius in Butler County, the Hamilton rooms — Brown Dawson Flick on Millville Avenue and Herr-Riggs on South Second Street among them — are served by Graythe Florist on South Erie Hwy. Closer in, the funeral homes strung along Springfield Pike, Plainfield Road and Route 4 handle most services for Sharonville itself, Springdale, Woodlawn, Evendale and Forest Park. Catholic burials from these ZIP codes very often finish at Gate of Heaven, the archdiocesan ground on Montgomery Road, and the division of labour around a Catholic funeral is worth knowing before you order: the casket spray belongs to the immediate family, while visitors send an easel piece for the chapel or a vase arrangement for the table by the register book. Everything a studio needs fits on one line — chapel, street, town, date, hour, and the surname exactly as it should read on the ribbon.

This radius also covers communities whose funeral customs are their own. Lincoln Heights, two miles off Sharonville's western edge, was incorporated in 1946 as one of the first self-governing Black communities north of the Ohio River, and along with Woodlawn and parts of Glendale and Springdale it shares the Princeton school district with Sharonville. Services here are often held in the family's own congregation on a Saturday, with a repast in the church hall straight afterward — so the arrangement that earns its place is one a single person can lift and carry from the sanctuary into that hall. Glendale, platted in 1851 as one of the earliest planned railroad suburbs in the country and a National Historic Landmark district today, holds services in its historic parishes, Christ Church Glendale among them, where the altar guild generally has settled views about placement; the funeral director will pass those on if you ask. Where the family belongs to one of the congregations in the Amberley Village and Kenwood cluster southeast of here, flowers do not go to the funeral at all. What belongs is a plant, or a fruit-and-flower piece, delivered to the house during the mourning week and addressed to the family rather than to one person. When you genuinely do not know, telephone the funeral director — they answer that question several times a day and answer it without judgement.