Sympathy flowers in Kennesaw

Kennesaw is a town whose name is generally traced to a Cherokee word said to mean burial ground, and whatever the etymology, the surrounding county has more consecrated ground per mile than almost anywhere in Georgia. Marietta National Cemetery on Washington Avenue was established in 1866 for the Union dead of the Atlanta campaign and still takes veteran burials today. The Marietta Confederate Cemetery lies a short distance away on the Powder Springs Street side with roughly three thousand graves. North of the city, the Georgia National Cemetery opened in 2006 on Mount Carmel Church Lane in Canton and is now the Department of Veterans Affairs cemetery serving north Georgia, which means a great many Cobb and Cherokee County families bury there. And Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park itself, with Cheatham Hill and the Illinois Monument inside it, is a burial landscape that happens also to be a place people walk their dogs. None of this is decoration. If the service you are sending flowers to is at a national cemetery, the mechanics are different from a private one, and getting them wrong wastes both the money and the gesture.

Here is what changes at Marietta National and at Georgia National in Canton. A committal service at a VA national cemetery is held at a committal shelter, not at the grave; families are given a scheduled slot, usually around twenty to thirty minutes, and the interment itself happens afterwards, out of sight, once the party has left. Standing sprays and easel pieces brought to the shelter are moved to the gravesite by cemetery staff later the same day. National cemeteries also have written floral policy: no glass containers of any kind, arrangements are removed on a published schedule once they wilt, and there are set periods when artificial flowers are and are not permitted. Practically speaking, this means you do not send an arrangement directly to a national cemetery and you do not schedule one to arrive at a graveside. You send it to the funeral home handling the service, where it will be set for the visitation and then carried, or you send it to the family's house. If the service includes military honors — and a large share do here, with Dobbins Air Reserve Base in the county and the veteran population that comes with it — the schedule is tighter still. Ask the funeral director for the chapel address and the visitation window, and give both to the shop.

Congregational services are common here and the practice varies by congregation, not by category. St. Catherine of Siena in Kennesaw and Transfiguration in Marietta handle the Catholic funeral Masses on this side of the county, with the Church of St. Ann on the East Cobb side; flowers for a Mass are usually set before the body is received and the family's own piece is the one that travels. First Baptist Church Woodstock on Highway 92 is one of the largest congregations in Georgia and runs memorial services at a scale that needs a named staff contact rather than a general address — Brenda's is minutes away and knows the building. Turner Chapel AME and Zion Baptist Church in Marietta, the latter a congregation with roots back to 1866 and a long standing in the city's Black community, hold homegoing services where the family piece and the church's own arrangements are planned together and the timing is set by the program rather than by the clock. On the East Cobb side, Congregation Etz Chaim and Temple Kol Emeth are the two synagogues most Kennesaw-area Jewish families belong to; flowers are generally not part of a Jewish funeral, and the right gesture is something sent to the shiva house afterwards — a plant, or a fruit basket, and a card that says you will come by. If you are unsure which convention applies, say so on the order. The shops here ask the funeral home; they do it routinely and it costs you nothing.