Cremation Services

Kaiser Permanente Sunnyside Medical Center at 10180 SE Sunnyside Road is the hospital here, with a 24 hour emergency department reachable directly on 503-652-2880. It is a considerable operation, with a regional heart and vascular center, a cancer center, neurosurgery and a Level III neonatal unit, and Kaiser puts around 2,300 clinical staff on the campus. A replacement tower with 308 beds broke ground in 2026 for a 2029 opening, so expect construction on that site for years yet.

One caution about the address, and it has caught families out. Providence Milwaukie Hospital is at 10150 SE 32nd Avenue and Kaiser Sunnyside is at 10180 SE Sunnyside Road. Two hospitals, nearly the same building number, different streets, four minutes apart. When you tell anyone where your person is, give the street name and not just the number. Adventist Health Portland on SE Market Street is the third option nearby.

Two licensed hospice agencies carry Clackamas addresses, and both are on the same road as the hospital: Agape Hospice NW at 10163 SE Sunnyside Road, Suite 340, and Bristol Hospice Oregon at 12550 SE 93rd Avenue. Agape sits directly opposite Kaiser. No licensed hospice has a Happy Valley address, so a Happy Valley family is being served from Clackamas, Milwaukie or Portland whatever the letterhead says.

Residential care here is concentrated in a few large buildings: Miramont Pointe on SE Sunnyside Road is licensed for 186, twenty-one of those memory care; The Springs at Sunnyside for 61 and Footsteps at Sunnyside, memory care, for 26, both on SE Princeton Village Way.

We collect from any of them, and from private homes, at any hour. A hospice nurse can call us directly.

Here is something true of nowhere else in Oregon. The state medical examiner and the county medical examiner both work from a building in Clackamas.

The Oregon State Medical Examiner, part of the Oregon State Police, is at 13309 SE 84th Avenue, Suite 100, on 971-673-8200, weekdays 8:00 to 5:00. The Clackamas County Medical Examiner is in the same suite at the same address, on 503-655-8380. Every death investigation in the state is supervised from an industrial street a few minutes from Clackamas Town Center.

What that means in practice is short. If a death here is sudden, unattended or unexplained, it falls to the county office rather than the state one, and the state directs people to contact Clackamas County directly for its own cases. The examination itself is a public function and is not billed to your family. Reports cost $25, by check, and that fee is waived for a parent, spouse, sibling, child or personal representative.

Families usually fear this stage will add weeks. It rarely does, and we work with the office as a matter of routine. Ask us rather than guessing at a timeline.

Clackamas County Vital Records is at 2051 Kaen Road, Suite 367, in Oregon City, on 503-655-8406, a short run down I-205 from here.

The county works four days a week. Monday to Thursday, 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., and closed all day Friday. That is county-wide rather than a vital records quirk, so the same applies if you also need the veteran service office. Certified copies are $25.00, first and each additional alike, paid by cash, card, check or money order. Most orders arrive within a week and a counter visit can be same day.

Now the piece that is specific to this community, and it works in your favor. A death at Kaiser Sunnyside is a Clackamas County record. The hospital sits in unincorporated Clackamas County, so a Portland resident who dies there does not have their certificate issued in Multnomah County. Their family orders from Kaen Road. Given how many people from across the metro are treated at Sunnyside, this comes up constantly and is almost never explained.

The six month limit matters more than the fee does. The county can only issue for a death that occurred here less than six months ago. After that the record moves to the state, where a mailed order takes three to five weeks and a drop box order eight to ten. Order what you might need while it is still a same day errand.

We order certificates at $30 each and file the record for you.

Clackamas lost its newspaper and never got a replacement, so start by knowing what is actually left.

The Clackamas Review was renamed the Milwaukie Review in the first week of August 2023 and cut from weekly to monthly. Its publisher said plainly that the alternative was closing it. Carpenter Media Group then bought Pamplin in June 2024. The upshot is that no surviving title has Clackamas in its name, and the community is covered by a monthly named after the city next door.

Obituaries still run, through the Review’s submission desk on 503-620-7355. The form lets you choose which of two dozen community papers and websites the notice appears in, so a Clackamas family with relatives in Happy Valley, Milwaukie or Oregon City can have it published across all of them. The notice runs in the paper, on the website and in a daily obituary email. No rate card is published; the stated position is that cost depends on how many words and photographs you submit.

The Oregonian is the regional option and starts at $264, which includes a permanent memorial page and guest book.

The obituary we publish here costs you nothing, carries photographs, and has no word limit worth worrying about.

Oregon sets no law on scattering. Ashes may be kept, divided, buried, or scattered on private land with the owner’s consent, and there is no permit and no register. Federal land is the exception, and the eastern half of this county is Mount Hood National Forest, so contact the relevant ranger district before planning anything up there. The Clackamas River is the obvious local choice, and the question is only ever whose bank you are standing on.

For interment, the range here runs from the free to the substantial.

Clackamas Pioneer Cemetery is the one nobody expects. It sits at 13595 SE Ambler Road, in the middle of the industrial area between the truck rental yards, and it dates to 1850. Seventy-two veterans are buried there and the oldest marked grave is from 1862. It has been kept up by a volunteer community group since 1910, which means no corporation owns it and no salesperson works there. Whether it can take a new cremated remains interment is a conversation rather than a price list.

Lincoln Memorial Park at 11801 SE Mount Scott Boulevard, on 503-771-1117, is the large commercial option and it does publish figures: columbaria from $4,995 and cremation gardens, for urn burial or scattering, from $2,995. It is a Dignity Memorial property, owned by Service Corporation International, and those are starting prices rather than quotes.

Directly across the road, at 11800 SE Mount Scott Boulevard, is Willamette National Cemetery, on 503-273-5250, which accommodates both casketed and cremated remains. For an eligible veteran it costs nothing. A free federal cemetery and a $4,995 niche face each other across the same street, which is the clearest illustration of this market we can give you.

We sell no cemetery property and receive nothing from any of the places above.

It is easier to work through this by asking who actually receives the money, because that determines what you have to do and when. Three categories, and families routinely miss the third.

MONEY PAID TO YOUR FAMILY. There is less of this than people expect.

Social Security pays $255, once, to a surviving spouse, and where there is none to a child aged 17 or under, 18 or 19 and still in school, or disabled before 21. Claim it inside two years. 1-800-772-1213, weekdays 8:00 to 7:00, or start it through a my Social Security account. Going in person now requires an appointment.

The VA burial allowance is the other one: $1,002 toward burial and $1,002 toward a plot for a death not connected to service, at the rates effective October 1, 2025, on Form 21P-530EZ within two years. Read the second half carefully. The plot allowance only pays where there was a plot to pay for, so if you use a national cemetery it does not apply. You take the free interment or you take the plot money. VA benefits, 1-800-827-1000.

MONEY PAID TO THE FUNERAL HOME INSTEAD OF YOU. This is the category that confuses people, because a family applies and then nothing arrives in their account.

Oregon has no county indigent cremation program. Not in Clackamas County, not anywhere in the state. What exists is the Oregon Indigent Disposition Program, run by the Oregon Mortuary and Cemetery Board under ORS 97.170, on 971-673-1504, and three of its features decide whether it can help you at all. The payment reimburses the funeral establishment, never the family. It applies only where a body is unclaimed, and the Board’s guidance is blunt about the consequence: once any individual makes arrangements to pay for the disposition, the person is no longer indigent in law. And the reimbursement is a capped per-case figure the Board resets each biennium, not the cost of a cremation. It is funded by the $30 filing fee on every Oregon death certificate, which is to say by everyone reading this.

Oregon’s Crime Victims’ Compensation program works the same way where a death was a homicide: up to $5,000 paid directly to the funeral service provider, more possible case by case, plus grief counseling for the family. Department of Justice, 503-378-5348 or 1-800-503-7983, or through the district attorney’s victim assistance office. Ask them about the filing deadlines when you call, because the Department does not publish them on its current pages.

Tribal benefits also pay providers rather than relatives. The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde pay up to $7,000 toward funeral services plus $400 for a reception, for enrolled members and their spouses, parents and children under 25, and they ask the funeral home to make contact rather than the family. 1-800-422-0232 extension 2253, or 503-879-2116. The Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians pay up to $6,000 plus a $1,000 beneficiary benefit, disbursed to providers in a set order. 541-444-2532. Bureau of Indian Affairs assistance for indigent enrolled members is $3,500 as of July 2024, through the Northwest Regional Office on NE 11th Avenue in Portland.

THINGS THAT COST NOTHING, WHICH NOBODY BILLS AND THEREFORE NOBODY MENTIONS.

Willamette National Cemetery is at 11800 SE Mount Scott Boulevard, minutes from here, on 503-273-5250, and it takes cremated remains as readily as caskets. For an eligible veteran the site, its opening and closing, permanent upkeep, a government marker, a burial flag and a Presidential Memorial Certificate are all provided at no charge, and a spouse or dependent child is included on the same marker. A widow or widower who married again after the veteran died is still eligible. Booking goes through the National Cemetery Scheduling Office on 1-800-535-1117, not the cemetery, with discharge papers faxed to 1-866-900-6417 first.

Your county veteran service office files VA paperwork free. Clackamas County Veteran Services is at 2051 Kaen Road, Suite 281, in Oregon City, on 503-650-5631, Monday to Thursday. It is appointments only and the county publishes a wait of four to five weeks, so this is a call to make early rather than at the point of need.

And the medical examiner’s investigation, if there is one, is a public function that is not billed to you.

If none of the three categories reaches your situation, ring us before you borrow anything. Working out what a family qualifies for is part of the job.