Sympathy flowers in Charleston

A Charleston graveside service usually involves a climb. Spring Hill Cemetery sits on the ridge above the East End at 1555 Farnsworth Drive, looking down on the Capitol dome and the river, and it is where a large share of this city's families have buried their dead for well over a century - governors among them. The road up is narrow and winding, the sections are spread across the hilltop, and the practical consequence for flowers is that a graveside piece needs to be at the right section at the right hour rather than merely at the right cemetery. The same is true of Sunset Memorial Park in Charleston, Tyler Mountain Memory Gardens on Tyler Mountain Road in Cross Lanes, Cunningham Memorial Park in St. Albans, Kanawha Valley Memorial Gardens in Glasgow, Montgomery Memorial Park in London, and the Donel C. Kinnard Memorial State Veterans Cemetery in Dunbar, which serves veterans from across West Virginia and runs on a fixed committal schedule. The chapels themselves cluster tighter. Barlow Bonsall Funeral Home at 1118 Virginia Street East is an East End fixture a few blocks from the Capitol; Bartlett-Burdette-Cox and Cunningham-Parker-Johnson also serve Charleston proper; Snodgrass Funeral Home handles South Charleston; Keller Funeral Home is in Dunbar; Casdorph & Curry in St. Albans; Tyler Mountain Funeral Home in Cross Lanes; Hafer Funeral Home in Elkview; Gatens-Harding in Poca; Chapman Funeral Home serving Hurricane and Winfield; Stevens & Grass in Malden; Fidler & Frame in Belle; and Handley Funeral Home in Danville. All three studios - Foodamongthe Flowers at 513 Tennessee Avenue, Young Floral at 215 Pennsylvania Ave, Winter Floral Andantiques at 120 Washington St., W. - sit within the city core, 0 miles from the 25301 centroid, so the downtown and East End chapels are short runs and the outer river towns are the ones that need a head start.

Charleston's traditions are specific enough that saying what you are sending to matters. The Basilica of the Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart on Virginia Street East is the Catholic anchor for the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston, and a funeral Mass there runs on a set liturgical order in which an easel piece belongs in the chapel or the vestibule rather than in the sanctuary. The East End's older Protestant congregations - St. John's Episcopal on Quarrier Street, First Presbyterian a few blocks over downtown, Christ Church United Methodist on Quarrier - keep their own conventions about what sits at the front. First Baptist Church on Shrewsbury Street is one of the city's historic Black congregations, and in that tradition the arrangement frequently matters as much at the repast afterward as at the service itself, so a second piece for the fellowship hall is not an odd request. Temple Israel on Kanawha Boulevard East and B'nai Jacob Synagogue anchor a Jewish community that has been in Charleston since the nineteenth century; in both, flowers at a funeral are generally not the convention, and the right gesture is a charitable donation plus food or a plant sent to the family's home during the mourning week. St. George Orthodox Cathedral serves Charleston's long-established Lebanese and Syrian families, where the forty-day memorial is observed as seriously as the funeral. And across the coal-country hollows that feed into the valley - Cabin Creek, Campbells Creek, the Coal River and Elk River communities - the pattern is often a home visitation followed by a church dinner, which means a house delivery is not an afterthought but the main event.