Sympathy flowers in Davenport

Davenport is a cathedral city twice over, and that shapes how funerals here are scheduled. Sacred Heart Cathedral on East Tenth Street is the seat of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Davenport, which means it hosts not only parish funerals but diocesan services drawn from a wide stretch of southeast Iowa. Trinity Episcopal Cathedral on West Twelfth Street is the cathedral of the Episcopal Diocese of Iowa. St. Anthony's on North Main, the city's oldest Catholic parish, still handles funerals for families whose grandparents were buried out of the same building. Temple Emanuel on Mississippi Avenue serves Davenport's Reform congregation, with the Tri-City Jewish Center across the river in Rock Island. Practically, this means two things for a sympathy order. A cathedral Mass often runs to a diocesan calendar rather than a funeral home's convenience, so the service window may be earlier or later in the day than you assume. And a Jewish family will more often ask for a plant or a meal at the house than a chapel arrangement — ask the family or the funeral director which is wanted before you send anything to a building.

Burial in the Quad Cities is spread across grounds with very different rules. Oakdale Memorial Gardens on Eastern Avenue is Davenport's large historic cemetery, with a mausoleum and a Civil-War-era section, and it is close enough to the 52803 benches that a graveside piece can be timed to a committal rather than sent the day before. Mount Calvary and Fairmount carry much of the city's Catholic and older German burial history — Davenport was substantially settled by German immigrants, which is why so many nineteenth-century headstones here are in German. Across the river, Chippiannock Cemetery in Rock Island is an 1855 garden cemetery laid out on a bluff above the Mississippi, and Riverside Cemetery in Moline handles a large share of Illinois-side services. Rock Island National Cemetery sits on Arsenal Island, and it is the one address on this list that needs its own plan: the Arsenal is an active federal installation with controlled gates, and national cemetery grounds restrict what can be left at a grave and for how long. For a committal there, the working route is almost always through the funeral home handling the service — they are already cleared and scheduled — rather than a florist's van arriving at a gate.