Sympathy flowers in Simi Valley

The geography of grief here is unusual, and worth understanding if you are ordering from out of state. Simi Valley holds a genuinely famous grave: Ronald Reagan was interred on the grounds of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library at 40 Presidential Drive in June 2004, and Nancy Reagan beside him in March 2016, on a ridge above Madera Road with the whole valley below. Visitors bring flowers there by hand, on foot, as part of a museum visit; it is not a courier address and we will not pretend otherwise. The city's working funeral geography sits below that ridge and is smaller than the city is: Reardon Funeral Home serves families in town, St. Rose of Lima on Royal Avenue is the Catholic parish most Simi Valley Masses are said in, and Assumption Cemetery on Fitzgerald Road is the Archdiocese of Los Angeles ground inside the city limits — a modest, open, hillside-facing cemetery where a great many of this valley's original families are buried.

Beyond the city line, four grounds do most of the rest of the work, and which one a family uses usually has less to do with faith than with which side of which hill somebody's parents bought a plot forty years ago. Oakwood Memorial Park on Lassen Street in Chatsworth is the closest large memorial park to the east end of the valley — straight over the Santa Susana Pass and down, ten minutes from Kuehner Drive on a good morning and thirty-five on a bad one. Pierce Brothers Valley Oaks Memorial Park on Lindero Canyon Road in Westlake Village picks up the families who moved south over the years, reached by the 23 and the 101 rather than the pass. Conejo Mountain Memorial Park on Howard Road in Camarillo is the Ventura County ground that families out along Madera and Tierra Rejada tend to use, and Ivy Lawn Memorial Park on Valentine Road in Ventura is the coastal end of the same pattern, a genuine forty-minute drive from Cochran Street. Up the other way, Eternal Valley on Sierra Highway in Newhall takes the Santa Clarita side of an extended family. Ask the funeral director for the exact chapel and the hour; the difference between two chapels in the same park is a twenty-minute walk with an arrangement in your arms.

Then the weather, which in Simi Valley is not a footnote at a graveside. This is a hot inland trough, not the coast: from July into early October afternoons sit in the high nineties and past 100, and a cut arrangement left standing in that sun on open ground has perhaps an hour of dignity in it. The other half of the year brings the opposite problem. Santa Ana winds funnel east to west through the Santa Susana Pass in autumn — this is the corridor where the Woolsey Fire began at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory site in the Simi Hills in November 2018, and where the Easy Fire ran up to the Reagan Library's own hillside in October 2019 — and a tall easel-mounted piece on an exposed cemetery slope in a thirty-mile-an-hour sundowner does not stay standing. For graveside work in those months, ask for low, dense, weighted designs: chrysanthemum, carnation, stock and alstroemeria in a heavy vessel, rather than height and open blooms. Our benches build to that instruction when you give it.