Sympathy flowers in Madison

Speedway Road tells you most of what you need to know about a Madison funeral. In the space of a few blocks on the near west side it holds Forest Hill Cemetery, the city-owned burial ground opened in 1857 whose sections include Confederate Rest, the northernmost Confederate burial plot in the country, alongside Calvary Catholic Cemetery and the Cress Funeral and Cremation Service chapel at 3610 Speedway Road. A driver working a Dane County sympathy order often makes the visitation drop and the graveside drop within sight of each other. The rest of the map fans out from there: Resurrection Catholic Cemetery at 2705 Regent Street — roughly a mile and a half up the same street from Chole's Floral at 1135 Regent — Roselawn Memorial Park on South Gammon Road on the west side, the Gunderson Funeral and Cremation Care chapels at 5203 Monona Drive on the east and 2950 Chapel Valley Road in Fitchburg and 7435 University Avenue on the west, Ryan Funeral Home at 2418 North Sherman Avenue with its DeForest and Verona chapels, and the Cress locations in Sun Prairie, Middleton, McFarland, Stoughton and Deerfield.

Outside the city the services change character, and the 60-mile radius means we deliver to plenty of them. Dane County and the counties touching it are thick with Norwegian, Swiss and German Lutheran country churches — Stoughton, where the Norwegian-American heritage is still the town's identity, Mount Horeb along the ridge, New Glarus with its Swiss founding, Cross Plains, Blue Mounds, Black Earth, Belleville, Deerfield and Cambridge. A rural service there often runs church basement luncheon and all: the funeral at the church, the burial at a small cemetery a mile or two out on a county road, and the gathering in the fellowship hall afterward. For those, send to the church rather than the cemetery, because a township cemetery has no one to receive a delivery and no shelter for it. Name the church and the town, and if the obituary lists a funeral home in Madison handling arrangements for a service out of town, say which building you mean.