Sympathy flowers in Morgantown

For the services that are held in Monongalia County, the chapels are few and long-established. Hastings Funeral Home on Spruce Street sits inside the downtown grid, a short walk from Coomb's bench on High Street. McCulla Funeral Home works the Fairmont Road side toward Westover and draws the families out that way and down the WV 7 corridor. Smith Funeral and Cremation Care handles a large share of the cremation work in this market, which matters more than it sounds: West Virginia's cremation rate has climbed steadily for two decades, and a growing number of Morgantown families now hold no visitation at all. Instead there is a memorial service two, four, sometimes six weeks after the death, scheduled for whenever the children can fly in from Columbus, Charlotte, Raleigh or Northern Virginia. That completely changes the timing of a sympathy order. Flowers sent the week you hear the news arrive at a house with nothing happening in it; flowers timed to the memorial service arrive at a room full of people. Read the notice in The Dominion Post rather than guessing — it will say whether there is a visitation, whether the family has asked for donations instead, and when the service actually is. If there is a visitation it is normally a two-hour evening window, and that evening is when the arrangements are looked at and the cards read.

When a church is used rather than a funeral-home chapel, it is usually one of the older congregations on or just off the downtown grid: Trinity Episcopal on Willey Street, First Presbyterian on Spruce, Wesley United Methodist up near the downtown campus, St. Francis de Sales for the Catholic families, Suncrest United Methodist on the north side, and Chestnut Ridge Church out on the ridge road, which draws the largest and youngest congregation in the county. If the family belongs to Tree of Life Congregation on South High Street, the published notice will usually point you to a charity rather than to a florist, and what is actually wanted is food, or a potted plant carried to the house during the shiva week, rather than a piece standing at a service. The Islamic Center of Morgantown serves a community drawn heavily from the university and the hospital, and burial normally happens within a day, which effectively rules out a delivery timed to the service — send to the family's home afterwards instead. The discipline is the same throughout: the notice gives you the address and the hour, and the piece should land at the chapel or the church office in the morning, before the room is in use.

Burial geography is what changes the design here. Two of Morgantown's older cemeteries, Oak Grove and East Oak Grove, sit on sloping ground close to the city, and Beverly Hills Memorial Gardens holds the newer lawn burials on the Westover side. Those are straightforward. What is not straightforward is east and south of town. Preston County's burying grounds sit on ridge farmland at two and a half thousand feet and higher — Terra Alta, Aurora, Bruceton Mills, the ground above the Cheat River gorge — and the weather up there is not Morgantown's weather. Downtown can be wet and forty degrees while Briery Mountain is in six inches of snow and wind, and a graveside piece built tall for an indoor room will be flat on the ground before the family has finished walking from the cars. For a winter burial on that ground, low and dense with a weighted base is the only thing that survives. The same applies on the small family and church plots up the creek roads off WV 7 and WV 73, through the Deckers Creek valley toward Masontown and Reedsville and Arthurdale, where the drive in is gravel and the lot has no number. There is no reliable way for a van and a procession to reach the same gravel turnaround inside the same ten minutes. Route it to the chapel a day early and let it go out in the back of a family car, which is incidentally the only way it survives the drive standing.