Sympathy flowers in Yonkers

Almost every sympathy order placed in this city involves two addresses and one deadline, and the mistake people make is assuming the two addresses are the same place. The wake is typically at a Yonkers chapel — Whalen & Ball on Park Avenue and the Flynn Memorial Home at 325 South Broadway are two long-established ones — or at a chapel a few minutes over a municipal line in Mount Vernon, Eastchester, Bronxville, New Rochelle or the northwest Bronx, because this city's borders are tight and a grieving family often uses the funeral home their parents used rather than the nearest one. The burial is somewhere else again. Southeast Yonkers is roughly four miles from Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx; the Catholic families frequently go north to Gate of Heaven in Hawthorne; Ferncliff in Hartsdale, with its enormous mausoleum complex, is about eight miles up; Kensico in Valhalla and its Sharon Gardens section, Mount Hope in Hastings-on-Hudson, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Saint Raymond's in the Bronx and Yonkers' own Oakland Cemetery on the Saw Mill River side and Nepperhan Cemetery, the city's historic Black burying ground, all take their share. So the first question to ask the family, or the funeral director, is simple: where do you want the flowers.

Yonkers is one of the most religiously mixed cities in the state and the convention changes street by street, which matters more here than the design does. The Catholic weight is heavy and layered: the Italian and Irish parishes of the east and south side, the Irish corridor along McLean Avenue, and the very large Hispanic population — Dominican, Puerto Rican, Ecuadorian, Mexican — whose parishes around Getty Square and Nodine Hill run Spanish-language Masses; Saint Joseph's Seminary at Dunwoodie, the Archdiocese of New York's major seminary, sits in this city. Flowers are fully expected in all of that, at the chapel and at the graveside. In the Black churches of southwest Yonkers, Nodine Hill and Runyon Heights — AME Zion, Baptist and non-denominational congregations — flowers are likewise customary and the home-going service is often larger and later in the week, which gives you more time than a Catholic wake does. In the Jewish communities on the Lincoln Park and Midchester side and over the line toward Bronxville and Scarsdale, flowers are not the custom at all: the gesture is a plant or food sent to the shiva house, or a donation, and Sharon Gardens at Kensico is the local burial ground. At a Muslim janazah, flowers are generally not part of the rite either, and condolences go to the family's home in the days after. When you do not know, ask, or send to the house instead of the chapel — a plant at a front door is never wrong in any of these traditions.