Sympathy flowers in Columbus

Sympathy orders in Columbus can arrive inside a 24 to 72 hour window, and the first useful thing to know is that the metro's chapel map is dominated by one very old name with a lot of doors. Schoedinger Funeral and Cremation Service has been operating in Columbus since 1855 and runs chapels spread across the county — a midtown location near East State Street downtown, a northwest chapel on the Upper Arlington side, Worthington, the east side on East Broad, Grove City, Dublin and Hilliard — so a family telling you the service is at Schoedinger has told you almost nothing about where to send flowers. Ask which chapel. Beyond that the map is a set of neighborhood and community houses: Egan-Ryan Funeral Home on East Broad downtown and its northwest chapel, long the Catholic-leaning choice; Cook & Son-Pallay on Parsons Avenue serving German Village and the south side; Jerry Spears Funeral Home on West Broad for the Hilltop; Shaw-Davis Funeral Homes on the North High corridor; Tidd Funeral Home in Hilliard; Rutherford in Worthington and Powell; Moreland Funeral Home and Hill Funeral Home in Westerville; Newcomer on the northeast side and in Grove City; Diehl-Whittaker Funeral Service on East Long Street, a cornerstone of the historically Black King-Lincoln Bronzeville district; Marlan J. Gary Funeral Home, The Chapel of Peace on Cleveland Avenue on the north side; and Epstein Memorial Chapel in Bexley, the chapel the Columbus Jewish community has long used.

The other half of the map is where people are buried and where they are prayed over. Green Lawn Cemetery on Greenlawn Avenue opened in 1848 and is one of the largest burial grounds in Ohio — roughly 360 acres of it on the near south-west side, with James Thurber and Eddie Rickenbacker among the people under it, and it carries a lot of the metro's civic and old-family graveside services. Union Cemetery sits on Olentangy River Road opposite the northwest neighborhoods. On the Catholic side the Diocese of Columbus keeps St. Joseph Cemetery south of the city at Lockbourne, Mount Calvary inside the city, and Resurrection Cemetery up in Lewis Center; a Catholic funeral here usually runs as a vigil or calling hours one evening, a Funeral Mass the next morning — St. Joseph Cathedral on East Broad Street is the diocesan seat, with parish churches like Holy Cross and St. Mary in German Village doing a lot of the neighborhood work — and then a procession to the cemetery. Sunset Cemetery covers the west side out toward Galloway and Walnut Grove serves Old Worthington. Second Baptist Church, founded in 1824 and the oldest Black congregation in the city, and Shiloh Baptist on Mount Vernon Avenue anchor a long East Side tradition of homegoing services where flowers arrive both at the church and at the family's home.