Sympathy flowers in Joliet

Black Road is where this city says goodbye. Fred C. Dames Funeral Home at 3200, Carlson-Holmquist-Sayles at 2320, Blackburn-Giegerich-Sonntag at 1500 — three of the busiest chapels in Will County strung along one two-mile stretch of west-side pavement, all of them in the 60435 and 60431 blocks. Tezak's Home to Celebrate Life sits nearby on Plainfield Road, O'Neil takes the Lockport services out in the old canal town, and Kurtz Memorial Chapel takes New Lenox. A driver making two of those stops in one afternoon is making one trip, which is the good news. The less obvious news is what the funeral director needs from you, and it is never the date. It is the hour. Afternoon and early-evening visitations are straightforward work on a mid-morning order — the room is being set while our driver is still loading. A ten o'clock Mass is a different animal entirely: chapels want the flowers standing before the first family car pulls in, which no Will County route can manage on the morning itself. That one belongs to yesterday afternoon. Name the chapel, name the hour the doors open, and the rest is arithmetic somebody else does.

It helps to know that Joliet is a see city rather than an outer ring of somebody else's. The Cathedral of St. Raymond Nonnatus at 604 North Raynor Avenue is the mother church of a diocese that reaches across seven counties, and most funerals here still begin inside that parish system. St. Patrick's on West Marion Street holds the oldest rolls in the city. St. Joseph on North Chicago Street was raised by the Slovenian families who filled the near north side — the Slovenian Union of America still keeps its national headquarters on that same street — and the Croatian, Polish, Italian and Irish congregations that built the neighborhoods around it are within a few blocks of each other, with Spanish-language Masses now carrying a large share of the city's Sunday attendance. Families who moved out to the suburbs bury back through St. Jude in New Lenox, St. Mary Immaculate in Plainfield, St. Dennis in Lockport or St. Andrew the Apostle in Romeoville. The ground itself is mostly Mount Olivet Catholic Cemetery on North Broadway and Elmhurst Cemetery in town, with Resurrection Cemetery in Romeoville taking an ever-larger northern share. And because the old arsenal land lies just south of here, an enormous number of local veterans rest at Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery in Elwood, out past the prairie.