Sympathy flowers in Columbia

Columbia holds mid-Missouri's only Level 1 trauma center, and that single fact shapes almost every sympathy order that comes through this city. People are flown and driven here from twenty-some counties when something goes badly wrong, so a death in Columbia frequently belongs to a family whose church, cemetery and casserole dishes are in Moberly, Mexico, Fulton, Boonville, Marshall or a farm on a lettered route none of them have to think about to find. The practical consequence is that sympathy flowers ordered for Columbia split two ways, and getting the wrong one wastes the gesture. Some need to go to a hospital family room — the surgical waiting areas and quiet rooms at University Hospital and Ellis Fischel Cancer Center on Hospital Drive, the Harry S. Truman Memorial Veterans' Hospital at 800 Hospital Drive, or Boone Health at 1600 E Broadway — where the family is still keeping vigil and a small vase or a plant is the whole point. Others need to go where the service will actually be held, which is often not Columbia at all. Inside the city, Parker Funeral Service at 12 E Ash Street has handled downtown Columbia families for generations, and Memorial Funeral Home on Business Loop 70 West runs both a chapel and the adjoining Memorial Park Cemetery, which makes it the one address in town where a chapel piece and a graveside piece can be delivered on the same stop. Graveside services also go to the historic Columbia Cemetery just west of downtown, the 19th-century burying ground where a great many of the city's founding families and early university figures lie, and to the small church cemeteries scattered along Route B, Route WW, Route K, Route Z, Route E and Route PP through Boone County — Hartsburg, Rocheport, Harrisburg, Hallsville, Sturgeon, Ashland, Midway. Church services are their own category here: Missouri United Methodist Church at 204 S Ninth Street and Sacred Heart Catholic Church on Waugh Street sit inside the downtown grid, Our Lady of Lourdes is out on Bernadette Drive near the mall, the St. Thomas More Newman Center on Turner Avenue serves the university community and holds services for faculty and students, and the Second Missionary Baptist congregation on East Broadway has been part of Columbia since Reconstruction. Congregation Beth Shalom and the Islamic Center of Central Missouri serve the city's Jewish and Muslim families, where the convention is usually a donation or food to the home rather than cut flowers to a chapel — ask us and we will say so plainly.