Sympathy flowers in Portsmouth

A Portsmouth funeral commonly involves three addresses in one day, and the first useful thing to establish is which of them your flowers belong at. The chapel is often on the Portsmouth Boulevard corridor — Sturtevant Funeral Home keeps a chapel on that road, the same commercial spine where Hughe's Florist sits at 4242 Portsmouth Blvd, which makes that the shortest sympathy run on the entire grid and the only one that crosses no water. Metropolitan Funeral Service, long established in the region's Black community, keeps chapels on both banks of the Elizabeth River, and the Altmeyer and Hollomon-Brown firms operate chapels across Hampton Roads that Portsmouth families use routinely. The church, if there is one, is usually three miles away in Olde Towne: Trinity Episcopal on Court Street, a parish founded in 1762 and the oldest congregation in the city, with its colonial churchyard immediately beside the building; Monumental United Methodist on Dinwiddie Street; Emanuel AME on North Street, among the oldest Black congregations in Virginia; Court Street Baptist Church; and St. Paul Catholic Church on High Street. Then the burial, which may be back out Portsmouth Boulevard, or across a tunnel, or twenty minutes west in Suffolk. Put the specific address on the order and not just the family name — the chapel, the church and the graveside all have different arrival windows, and a piece sent to the wrong one of the three is a piece the family never sees.

Portsmouth's burial grounds are spread across the city rather than clustered in one complex. Olive Branch Cemetery and Oak Grove Cemetery take the largest share of local interments. The Mount Calvary Cemetery Complex is a group of historic African American burial grounds that has been the subject of sustained community preservation work, and families with several generations in Portsmouth are frequently burying in the same ground a great-grandparent is in. Trinity's churchyard in Olde Towne holds colonial-era graves and is not an active interment site in the ordinary sense. Across the water, Hampton National Cemetery on the Peninsula takes veterans, and the Albert G. Horton Jr. Memorial Veterans Cemetery sits west in Suffolk off the US-58 corridor. Both of those matter for the calendar rather than the design: this grid has no Peninsula bench, so a Hampton National graveside means a bridge-tunnel run and a day's lead time instead of a same-day order, and Horton sits at the outer edge of the live 18-mile radius. Tell us what hour the burial is set for. A graveside piece is only useful if it is already in place when the family reaches the plot, an easel needs ground firm enough to hold it upright, and the low sections of any Tidewater burial ground stay soft for days after a northeaster.

Two things about who dies in this city shape what gets ordered. The first is that Portsmouth is a retirement town for federal and Navy careers — obituaries here routinely account for thirty years at the shipyard or at the naval hospital, and the room is usually full of people who worked the same waterfront. Services skew toward a church rather than a chapel because of it, and the arrangements that come back from the church go to the family house afterward, so a piece built to sit on a table has a second life a spray on a wire easel does not. The second is military honors. When a veteran is buried with honors the casket is draped with the flag, which means a casket spray has nowhere to go — the family orders standing easel pieces, wreaths or table arrangements instead, and the funeral director will say so if asked. For a Jewish family the convention is different again: flowers are not part of the funeral at all, and the custom is food or a plant carried to the house where the family is sitting during the week that follows — our studios will put a plant in a plain vessel and take it to the residence instead of the service. Portsmouth's Gomley Chesed congregation is the city's historic Jewish community. And when a family has asked for donations instead of flowers, take the notice literally: give to what they named, and write the card anyway.