Sympathy flowers in Columbus

One fact shapes more funerals in this city than any other: Columbus is a garrison town, and a large share of the services held here end at a national cemetery. Fort Mitchell National Cemetery lies about twenty minutes south of the river on Highway 165 in Russell County, Alabama — the VA burial ground for the whole Chattahoochee Valley, which is why a Columbus family can sit through a chapel service in Georgia and bury someone in Alabama the same morning. Fort Mitchell does not behave like a private cemetery. Committals happen in an assigned shelter on the cemetery's clock, the interment itself takes place after the family has gone, and what may be left at a grave there, and for how long, is the cemetery's decision rather than the family's. Before ordering anything for that address, get three answers from the funeral director or the cemetery office: which shelter, what time, and what is being allowed at the moment. Nothing about that can be improvised by a driver at the gate. Closer in, Fort Benning's Main Post Cemetery and the post chapels carry a further share of the city's services, and Columbus funeral directors are practiced at fitting military honors — a firing party, a bugler, a flag folded and handed over — into a timetable that will not wait on flowers.

The city's own chapel and burial map is short enough to learn by name. Striffler-Hamby Mortuary is the long-established Columbus mortuary, working from Talbotton Road with a second chapel over on the Macon Road side. McMullen Funeral Home & Crematory takes a further share of the city's arrangements. Vance Brooks Funeral Home works out of Phenix City, directly across the Chattahoochee, which means a sympathy delivery in this market crosses a state line in under ten minutes — and one local peculiarity trips up out-of-town senders nearly every week. Phenix City and much of Russell County keep Eastern time in daily practice, even though Alabama is a Central-time state; so a service hour repeated to you over the phone and the hour showing on an Alabama-side clock can look an hour apart while meaning the same thing. Settle the hour in Eastern and write it that way on the order. For burial, Linwood Cemetery east of Uptown is the oldest ground in the city, laid out in the 1820s. Porterdale Cemetery beside it is the historic African American burial ground and holds Gertrude Pridgett — Ma Rainey, the Mother of the Blues, a Columbus native whose Fifth Avenue house still stands as a museum. Riverdale Cemetery on Victory Drive and Parkhill Cemetery and Mausoleum on Macon Road handle much of the present-day volume.