Sympathy flowers in Naperville

One geographic fact shapes almost every sympathy order in this city: Naperville's funeral work happens inside a mile of itself. Friedrich-Jones Funeral Home sits at 44 South Mill Street, a block off the downtown grid. Beidelman-Kunsch Funeral Homes runs chapels on South Washington Street and on North River Road. SS. Peter and Paul, the parish that has anchored Catholic Naperville since the 1840s, stands downtown on Ellsworth Street. Naperville Cemetery is at 705 South Washington Street. A service that begins with a morning Mass downtown and ends at a graveside can therefore be over in ninety minutes, with the procession covering less than two miles of Washington Street. The consequence for anyone sending flowers is that there is no slack in the schedule. A piece that arrives at the cemetery is very likely arriving after the family has left it; a piece that arrives at the chapel an hour into a two-hour visitation has already missed the people it was meant to comfort. So the one instruction worth giving every caller is this: put the hour the doors open into the order, not the date printed on the notice, and we will work backward from it. A four o'clock viewing is comfortable on a mid-morning order. A ten o'clock Mass is not a same-day job at all — it has to be placed the afternoon before, because a chapel wants its room finished before the first car turns into the lot, and no western-suburb route rolls early enough to manage that on the morning itself.

Naperville sits in the Diocese of Joliet, not the Chicago archdiocese, and that single administrative line explains a lot about where a family's service actually goes. The city's parishes — SS. Peter and Paul downtown, St. Raphael on Modaff Road, St. Elizabeth Seton on Lisson Road in the southwest, St. Thomas the Apostle on Brookdale Road — draw from four ZIPs and bury at SS. Peter and Paul Cemetery, at Naperville Cemetery, and increasingly at Resurrection Cemetery in Romeoville as the city's growth pushed south into Will County. Protestant services split between the downtown congregations and the large churches out along Route 59 and Book Road. Congregation Beth Shalom on West Fifth Avenue serves Naperville's Jewish community, where the convention runs toward a memorial donation rather than a chapel arrangement and a plant sent to the house during shiva is the appropriate gesture; burials from the western suburbs frequently head east to the Forest Park cemeteries rather than staying in DuPage. The Islamic Center of Naperville on Book Road serves a large Muslim community across the southwest side and Aurora, and a janazah there is arranged quickly, often within a day, which makes a same-day plant to the family's home the only realistic floral gesture. The Hindu Temple of Greater Chicago in Lemont, ten miles south, serves families across the Fox Valley and the southwest suburbs; rites there can fall several days after a death and white flowers are the convention. None of this is a rule to memorize — it is a reason to tell us which household you are sending to, because the right destination changes more often than the right flower does.