Sympathy flowers in Waco

The chapels here are a short, long-established list. Wilkirson-Hatch-Bailey Funeral Home at 6101 Bosque Boulevard and OakCrest Funeral Home and Memorial Park at 4520 Bosque Boulevard carry much of the county's work, and OakCrest has its own memorial park on the property, so a service and an interment can happen without a procession. Smaller chapels serve Bellmead, Hewitt, Robinson, McGregor, Mart and Marlin, and out-of-county families often use a home chapel in Hillsboro, Gatesville, Temple or Belton. Churches carry more of the actual services than chapels do, which is what you would expect in the city that hosts the largest Baptist university in the world: First Baptist Church of Waco on Webster Avenue downtown, Columbus Avenue Baptist Church, Highland Baptist, Antioch Community Church on North 20th, the East Waco congregations along the Elm Avenue corridor where a homegoing service runs longer and the flowers are read as part of the printed program, St. Louis Catholic Church on North 25th Street, and the Church of the Assumption in West, twenty minutes up I-35, which still anchors the Czech Catholic families of northern McLennan County. Give us the church and the hour and we will have the piece there before the family is seated.

Graveside work in this climate is a separate problem from chapel work. Oakwood Cemetery on South 5th Street is Waco's historic ground, where the city's nineteenth-century families and much of its civic history are buried, and its older sections have narrow lanes that a service party walks rather than drives. Waco Memorial Park on South Highway 77 toward Robinson handles a large share of modern interments. OakCrest Memorial Park sits with its funeral home on Bosque Boulevard. Veterans' families in this part of Texas use the Central Texas State Veterans Cemetery at Killeen, roughly fifty miles southwest and inside this page's 60-mile radius, which runs on a fixed committal-shelter schedule that does not wait — a piece that misses the window cannot be walked out to the site afterward. Central Texas summer is the real constraint: from June through September a tribute standing in full sun at a graveside has about two hours of dignity in it. Gladiolus, chrysanthemum, carnation, dendrobium orchid and heavy foliage hold; hydrangea and wide-open garden roses do not. A weighted base matters too, because the wind coming across open McLennan County pasture will take a light easel over.