Religion: Flowers

The old-fashioned custom of sending flowers to funerals, increasingly supplanted by a terse “Please Omit Flowers” in a death notice, is something worth preserving, thinks the Rev. W. Carter Merbreier, 34, of St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church in Philadelphia. In this month’s pastoral letter to his flock, he pleaded eloquently for flowers—at his own funeral, in any case.

“Don’t paste my casket with certificates for charities, and professorial chair endowments, and the hundred-and-one do-gooder agencies ghoulishly squeezing through the door of the funeral parlor for a handout. If you are going to be big-hearted … do it on your own time . . . and don’t wait for death to open up your heart to the needy and the sick. I believe flowers are proper and right at the time of death, beautifully symbolic of the brief human life, grown by God and thereby so precious to Him, even at its fading. So, no matter what others may say, send ME flowers. And don’t use my last mortal remains as a charity income tax deduction.”