Sympathy flowers in Des Moines

The metro's funeral homes sit along a handful of recognizable corridors, and the five studios route by corridor rather than by name alone. Hamilton's Funeral Home on Lyon Street is the downtown anchor, with the family's chapel at Highland Memory Gardens on the north side handling the services that end at that cemetery. Iles Funeral Homes works two well-known rooms: Westover Chapel on Hickman Road on the northwest side and Dunn's Chapel on Grand Avenue near the Ingersoll corridor. Caldwell Parrish Funeral Home & Crematory covers Urbandale and Johnston, McLaren's Resthaven Chapel serves West Des Moines and the western suburbs, and Ankeny Funeral Home & Crematory carries the north-metro services. Graveside work runs to Woodland Cemetery on Woodland Avenue — the city's oldest burial ground, laid out in 1848, where a committal often means a walk from the gate rather than a drive to the plot — plus Glendale Cemetery on University Avenue, the largest in the city, Highland Memory Gardens on the north side, and Resthaven on the West Des Moines side. Veterans' committals go to the Iowa Veterans Cemetery near Van Meter, west of the metro, which runs on a strict committal-shelter schedule: flowers have to be staged before the procession arrives, not after.

Des Moines is more varied in its traditions than a city of its size is usually given credit for, and the studios adjust the design rather than just the card. Catholic services run out of parishes across the Diocese of Des Moines, with St. Ambrose Cathedral on High Street downtown and the Basilica of St. John on University Avenue near Drake the two most recognizable rooms; full Mass protocols apply, with standing sprays and easel pieces staged for the vigil the evening before. The Jewish community centered on the Grand Avenue and Polk Boulevard corridor — Temple B'nai Jeshurun, Tifereth Israel Synagogue and Beth El Jacob — generally treats a charitable gift rather than flowers as the convention, with a plant arrangement sent to the shiva home appropriate and welcome. St. George Greek Orthodox Church keeps Orthodox conventions including the forty-day and one-year remembrances. The historically Black congregations along the Sixth Avenue and Forest Avenue corridor, Corinthian Baptist Church among them, hold longer homegoing services where a large easel piece is expected and the family is named on the ribbon. The Islamic Center of Des Moines serves a community that includes the metro's substantial Bosnian population, and Muslim burial timing is fast — often within a day — so that order is a phone call, not a scheduled delivery. And Des Moines is home to the largest Tai Dam community in the United States, resettled here in the 1970s under Governor Robert D. Ray, whose name is on the drive beside the Botanical Garden; alongside the Laotian, Vietnamese, Sudanese and Karen communities that followed, those funerals follow conventions the neighborhood shops have learned by repetition.