Sympathy flowers in West Los Angeles

Most people who live here do not notice Westwood Village Memorial Park until they need it. It sits behind the Wilshire office blocks at 1218 Glendon Avenue, a small walled ground you can walk to from the Village in five minutes, and it holds Marilyn Monroe, Natalie Wood, Dean Martin, Truman Capote, Billy Wilder, Jack Lemmon, Farrah Fawcett, Frank Zappa and Kirk Douglas among many thousands of people nobody wrote about. That compression is the character of sympathy work in West Los Angeles. Within the same few miles are the Los Angeles National Cemetery at 950 South Sepulveda Boulevard, directly across from the Veterans Administration campus, where committal services run on a tight schedule under the shelters; Woodlawn Cemetery, Mausoleum and Mortuary at 1847 14th Street in Santa Monica, the city-run ground; Gates, Kingsley and Gates on Arizona Avenue in Santa Monica; Hillside Memorial Park and Mortuary on West Centinela Avenue, the terraced Jewish memorial park whose waterfall is visible from the 405; Holy Cross Cemetery at 5835 West Slauson Avenue in Culver City, the archdiocesan ground where Bing Crosby, Rita Hayworth and Sharon Tate are buried; and Inglewood Park Cemetery at 720 East Florence Avenue. Mount Sinai Memorial Park and Forest Lawn in the Hollywood Hills sit at the outer edge of the ring. A driver can reach most of these in twenty minutes at ten in the morning and not in an hour at four in the afternoon, which is the entire scheduling argument for ordering early.

West Los Angeles is also a place where the right gesture is frequently not flowers at all, and knowing that is part of doing this well. The Jewish communities of Westwood, Cheviot Hills, Beverlywood, Pico-Robertson and Brentwood — served by congregations including Sinai Temple at 10400 Wilshire Boulevard, University Synagogue on Sunset in Brentwood and Stephen Wise Temple above Bel-Air, and by Hillside Memorial Park — generally do not place flowers at a graveside, and a charitable donation in the person's memory is the customary condolence, with food or a living plant sent to the shiva home rather than cut flowers to a chapel. The jade plant on the current shelf is the piece that fits that convention. In the Japanese-American community that built Sawtelle, services at the West Los Angeles Buddhist Temple at 2003 Corinth Ave follow Jodo Shinshu practice, where white chrysanthemum arrangements are traditional and a koden envelope is customary. Catholic services at St. Sebastian on Federal Avenue, St. Timothy on West Pico, St. Martin of Tours in Brentwood and St. Monica in Santa Monica take flowers in the ordinary way, with Mass cards alongside. At the national cemetery, the flag and the honors carry the service and the flowers are secondary. When in doubt, send to the family's home a day or two after, when the house has emptied out and the casseroles have stopped.