Sympathy flowers in Colorado Springs

A funeral in this city is as likely to be a military one as a civilian one, and that changes almost everything about how sympathy flowers are sent here. Fort Carson, Peterson and Schriever Space Force Bases, Cheyenne Mountain Space Force Station and the Air Force Academy have left El Paso County with one of the densest veteran populations in the country, and the burials follow. Pikes Peak National Cemetery at 10545 Drennan Road, out on the shortgrass plains southeast of the airport in 80925, is where most of them now happen — before it existed, Front Range families drove to Fort Logan in Denver, which is a different kind of grief altogether. A VA national cemetery does not work like a private one. Services are committal services held in a covered shelter rather than at the open grave, they are scheduled in fixed windows that run one after another, the family does not gather at the headstone afterward in the way people expect, and there are written rules about what may be left on a grave and for how long, including restrictions on glass. Ask the studio to build low, dense and wired rather than tall, and skip the glass vessel. The other reason to build low is the wind: that ground is open prairie with nothing between it and the Palmer Divide, and a downslope Front Range gust will lay a tall easel spray flat before the family reaches their cars. The Air Force Academy cemetery on the north end of town, up past the Cadet Chapel, has the same exposure and the same instinct for restraint.

The civilian side of the city has its own geography, most of it within a few minutes of downtown. The Shrine of Remembrance at 1730 East Fountain Boulevard, with its mausoleum and chapels, is the landmark most Colorado Springs families name first. Swan-Law Funeral Directors at 501 North Walnut Street has served the near-west side for generations, and The Springs Funeral Services carries a large share of the east-side volume. Evergreen Cemetery at 1005 South Hancock Avenue is the historic municipal burying ground, in use since the 1870s, and it holds a great many of the city's founding families along with a deep veterans presence — it is also the most sheltered of the local grounds, which matters in March. Church services run through a small, well-known set of buildings: St. Mary's Cathedral at 22 West Kiowa Street downtown, First Presbyterian Church at 219 East Bijou, Grace and St. Stephen's Episcopal at 601 North Tejon, First United Methodist at 420 North Nevada, New Life Church up on Voyager Parkway for the north-side evangelical congregations, and Temple Shalom for the city's Jewish community. Down the I-25 corridor toward Pueblo the tradition is often Hispanic Catholic, where a rosary or vigil the evening before the funeral Mass is the gathering that matters most, and flowers timed for the vigil are seen by more people than flowers timed for the burial.