Sympathy flowers in Falls Church

The oldest burial ground in this city is a churchyard in the middle of it. The Falls Church Episcopal at 115 East Fairfax Street — the 1769 brick building that gave the city its name, a block off the Broad and Washington crossing — keeps a colonial-era graveyard on its own grounds, and a memorial service there ends fifty steps from where it began. Almost nothing else about sympathy work here is that self-contained. A 2.2-square-mile jurisdiction does not hold its own crematory, its own memorial park and a full slate of chapels, so Falls Church families use a set of buildings that sit on the city's edges and in the four Fairfax County ZIPs that share its mailing name. Murphy Funeral Home keeps a Falls Church chapel at 1102 West Broad Street, the most walkable option for anyone in 22046 itself, with its second location on Wilson Boulevard in Arlington. Out on Route 29 in 22042, National Funeral Home at 7482 Lee Highway stands on the same grounds as National Memorial Park, and King David Memorial Gardens — the Jewish burial ground on that property — is on the same access road, which is why a great many families in this part of the county hold the service and the interment within a few hundred yards of each other and never form a highway procession at all. West and south, Money & King Funeral Home on West Maple Avenue in Vienna, Fairfax Memorial Funeral Home and Fairfax Memorial Park on Braddock Road, Demaine Funeral Home in Fairfax, Springfield and Alexandria, Everly-Wheatley on West Braddock Road and Cunningham Turch on Cameron Street in Old Town take the rest. Across the bridges, Joseph Gawler's Sons on Wisconsin Avenue NW, Torchinsky Hebrew Funeral Home on Carroll Street NW and Pumphrey's in Bethesda serve plenty of Falls Church families too; the region's funeral geography has never cared about the Potomac. Arlington National Cemetery is five to six miles east, close enough to matter and different enough to need its own paragraph. One more piece of local geography is worth knowing: Falls Church funeral traffic does not travel far. The Murphy chapel on West Broad Street, the churchyard at 115 East Fairfax Street and the Lee Highway memorial grounds all sit within roughly two miles of one another, so a service, a procession and a burial here can happen without ever touching the Beltway. The studios plan sympathy runs around that small triangle rather than around a highway, which is why a morning order can reach a chapel with hours in hand rather than minutes.