Sympathy flowers in Hartford

Greater Hartford still keeps the older New England order of service, and it is the single most useful thing to understand before you order. Calling hours are commonly held in a funeral home on an evening, in one or two blocks — four to seven, or five to eight — with the funeral Mass or service the following morning at a church, and burial after that. Flowers therefore have two possible destinations and two different deadlines: the chapel, where the piece must be standing before the first visitor arrives, and the church or graveside, where it has to be in place before the family does. If you are told only the day of the funeral, ask whether there are calling hours the night before, because that is usually the delivery you actually want. The area's chapels each run their own room layout and their own clock: Molloy Funeral Home on Farmington Avenue in West Hartford, Taylor & Modeen on South Main Street and Sheehan-Hilborn-Breen on New Britain Avenue, also West Hartford, D'Esopo Funeral Chapel and Farley-Sullivan in Wethersfield, the Duksa Family chapels in Newington and New Britain, Carmon Funeral Home on Bloomfield Avenue in Windsor with sister chapels out through Avon and Granby, Rose Hill Funeral Home in Rocky Hill, and John F. Tierney Funeral Home and Holmes-Watkins in Manchester. In Hartford itself, Weinstein Mortuary on Farmington Avenue serves the region's Jewish families, where the conventions are entirely different and covered further down this page.

Cedar Hill Cemetery on Fairfield Avenue is the graveside address that matters most here, and it is worth knowing what you are sending flowers into. It is a Victorian landscape cemetery laid out in the 1860s, and it holds Samuel Colt, Katharine Hepburn, J.P. Morgan and Wallace Stevens — the Hartford Accident and Indemnity executive who wrote his poems on the walk to the office. A graveside piece at Cedar Hill needs to survive wind coming off an open hillside, which is an argument for a weighted easel or a tied sheaf rather than anything tall and light. Spring Grove Cemetery on the northern side of the city, Mount St. Benedict in Bloomfield — the Archdiocese of Hartford's main Catholic ground — Fairview Cemetery in West Hartford, Rose Hill Memorial Park in Rocky Hill, the historic Palisado Cemetery in Windsor and East Cemetery in Manchester carry most of the remaining burial volume inside the 18-mile radius. Downtown's Ancient Burying Ground behind Center Church, in use from the 1640s, is a historic site rather than an active cemetery; the graveside services people mean when they say downtown are almost always Cedar Hill. For a burial rather than a chapel visit, the delivery has to be staged with the cemetery office, not left at a gate — several of these grounds have specific rules about what may stand at a plot after the service and for how long, and the studios ask before they build.

The churches carry their own conventions. The Cathedral of Saint Joseph on Farmington Avenue, seat of the Archdiocese of Hartford, and St. Patrick–St. Anthony on Church Street downtown, run by the Franciscans, take the largest share of the region's Catholic funerals; Christ Church Cathedral on Main Street is the Episcopal seat; Center Church, Asylum Hill Congregational — Mark Twain's church when he lived on Farmington Avenue — and Immanuel Congregational cover the Congregational tradition. In the North End, Faith Congregational Church and Shiloh Baptist on Albany Avenue anchor a Black church tradition where the homegoing service is the center of the week and standing sprays, easel pieces and a substantial casket arrangement are welcomed rather than discouraged. Hartford's Puerto Rican community — one of the largest per-capita in the country, centered on Park Street and Frog Hollow — leans Catholic with strong preferences for white and cross-form pieces, and the South End's Italian blocks along Franklin Avenue run to the same full Catholic vocabulary. New Britain's Little Poland, ten miles southwest and inside the radius, adds Polish-Catholic services where a wreath is more common than a spray. The West Indian and Jamaican community in Upper Albany and Blue Hills holds services that often wait on family arriving from the islands, which is why a Hartford funeral date can move by a week — confirm before you send.