Sympathy flowers in Harrisonburg

The first thing to establish about a Harrisonburg funeral is where it is being held, because the answer is frequently not a chapel. The funeral homes here - Kyger Funeral Home, McMullen Funeral Home and Lindsey Funeral Home inside the city, Grandle Funeral Home up in Broadway, Johnson Funeral Service down in Bridgewater - will very often be handling the arrangements while the service itself takes place in the family's own congregation: a Mennonite meetinghouse, a Church of the Brethren sanctuary, one of the downtown churches on South Main, or a country church with a graveyard beside the parking lot. Burial follows the same logic. Woodbine Cemetery is Harrisonburg's principal city burying ground and takes a great many graveside services; the historic Newtown Cemetery near the Northeast Neighborhood is the resting place of generations of the city's Black families and carries its own weight in this community. But a large share of Rockingham County burials happen in congregational graveyards out toward Dayton, Weavers, Linville, Broadway, Timberville, Keezletown or Port Republic, where the gate has a church name rather than a street number. Tell us the church name and the nearest town and the shop will find it. Guessing an address from a cemetery name alone is how flowers end up at the wrong gate on the wrong morning.

The second thing to establish is what the family actually wants, and in this valley that question carries more weight than it does in most American cities. Harrisonburg sits at the middle of one of the largest Mennonite and Brethren populations in the eastern United States - Eastern Mennonite University and Eastern Mennonite School are here, the Virginia Mennonite Retirement Community is out on Virginia Avenue, Bridgewater College down the road was founded by the Church of the Brethren, and there are plain-dress Old Order households in the northern end of the county who travel by horse and buggy. Among many of those families a funeral is deliberately simple, the emphasis falls on the fellowship meal in the church basement rather than on display, and a very large arrangement can read as the wrong gesture however kindly it was meant. In other Harrisonburg communities the expectation runs the other way entirely. Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church serves a large Spanish-speaking congregation for whom a substantial standing piece at the wake is exactly right, and the city's refugee and immigrant families - the reason Harrisonburg City Public Schools count more than fifty home languages - bring their own conventions with them. None of that is guessable from a ZIP code. Ask a relative, or tell us who the family is and let the shop ask the funeral director.