Cremation Services

Longtime residents still say Stevens, and the habit tells you the history. The hospital at 21601 76th Avenue West opened in 1964 as Stevens Memorial, built by a public hospital district. The district leased it to Swedish in 2010 and renamed itself the Verdant Health Commission, which is why the levy still appears on an Edmonds tax bill for a hospital the city no longer runs. It trades today as Swedish Edmonds Campus, on 425-640-4000, with a Level IV emergency department and 217 licensed beds. A palliative care and symptom management clinic sits across the parking lot at 21616 76th Avenue West.

Level IV means stabilize and transfer. Anything major leaves town, and it leaves in one of two directions. North to Providence Regional Medical Center Everett, the county’s adult Level II. Or south to UW Medical Center Northwest at 1550 North 115th Street, which is barely fifteen minutes down Aurora and is in King County. That second direction changes the paperwork, and the next question is about nothing else.

No licensed hospice agency keeps an Edmonds street address. Families here are served from just outside it: AccentCare Hospice at 3400 188th Street SW in Lynnwood, EvergreenHealth Hospice in Kirkland, and Bristol Hospice on 4th Avenue West in Everett. One caution on a name you may be given. The agency families still call Providence Hospice now operates as a joint venture with Compassus, so the letterhead may not match what the referring nurse said.

What Edmonds does have, in unusual quantity for forty-three thousand people, is long-term care. Edmonds Post Acute on 72nd Avenue West is licensed for 128 beds, Edmonds Landing for 83, Sunrise of Edmonds for 76, Cogir of Edmonds for 70 and Rosewood Courte memory care for 46. A good share of the deaths we attend in this city happen in one of those five buildings rather than at the hospital.

We collect from all of them, and from private homes, at any hour. If your person is on hospice service, their nurse can call us directly.

It matters twice, and almost nobody mentions it until it is already a problem.

Edmonds is bounded by Woodway to the west, Lynnwood to the east and north, Mountlake Terrace to the southeast, and Shoreline to the south, which is King County. The line is a street, not a river, and people cross it without noticing.

First, the medical examiner. A sudden or unattended death is investigated by the county it happened in. In Edmonds that is the Snohomish County Medical Examiner in Everett. Half a mile south in Shoreline, or at UW Medical Center Northwest, it is the King County Medical Examiner in Seattle. Two different offices, two different sets of hours, two different phone numbers to be given.

Second, the fee. King County charges a $100.00 disposition authorization on every death in the county. Snohomish County charges no such fee. So a death at the hospital fifteen minutes down Aurora carries a hundred dollars of county cost that the identical death at home in Edmonds does not. It is billed to us and itemized to you at cost, and it is not something either county advertises.

Ordering the certificate afterward is the one part that does not follow the line, which is the next question.

The counter is the Snohomish County Health Department Vital Records office, 3020 Rucker Avenue, Suite 104, in Everett, on 425-339-5290, weekdays 8:00 to 4:30.

Check the date before you drive. The front counter closes from 8:00 to 9:30 on the first and third Thursday of every month for staff meetings. It is a twenty minute drive from Edmonds and an entirely wasted one if you arrive at nine on the wrong Thursday.

Here is the part that rescues an Edmonds family from the county line. Registration follows the place of death, but ordering does not. Since 2011 Washington deaths have been filed in a single statewide electronic register, and this office issues any of them. So a person who died in Shoreline, or at a Seattle hospital, is still a certificate you can collect in Everett. You do not have to drive to King County to buy back a King County death.

On the fee, expect $25.00 per copy and be ready to be told otherwise. State law sets $25, the county’s own page still shows $20 in one place, and that same page still uses Snohomish Health District, a name the agency retired. Call before you post a check.

We order certificates for the families we serve at $30 each and file the record ourselves, in whichever county it belongs.

Edmonds is one of the few places we serve where an obituary rate is published at all, and reading it closely is worth your time.

My Edmonds News charges a one-time fee of $50, and publishes obituaries submitted by Beck’s Funeral Home free of charge. That is their stated policy, in writing on their contact page. It is a courtesy to one funeral home rather than a rate card, so if you are not using Beck’s the number is fifty dollars. Send the text and a photograph with a billing address; the office line is 425-772-3056.

The Edmonds Beacon still prints every Thursday, out of 728 3rd Street in Mukilteo, on 425-347-5634, with obituaries handled through its classifieds desk. It publishes no rate, so you will have to ask for one.

The Everett Daily Herald takes obituaries through its online portal and says only that pricing is flexible according to length and photographs. No figure is published there either.

A full obituary on this site, with photographs, costs you nothing and is part of what you have already paid for.

In Edmonds the answer is usually the water at the end of Main Street, and the law is on your side about it.

RCW 68.50.130 governs this, and the Department of Licensing publishes the list of permitted places. Puget Sound is named on it, along with the state’s other public navigable waters. So scattering from the pier, from the beach at Marina Beach or Brackett’s Landing, or from the deck of the Kingston ferry is squarely within what the state allows. Private land needs the owner’s consent, and that is the whole of the restriction most families run into.

The instruction people miss is a small one. Scatter the contents only. The container goes in the trash separately, and so does the numbered identification disc inside it, which is metal and should not go in the water.

If you are thinking of the mountains across the water rather than the water itself, know that the rules change at the park boundary. Olympic National Park requires the chief ranger’s permission, and every national park handles it differently. Ask before you plan a date around it.

Scattering at sea is available through us for $195.

Almost none of this is offered to you. It has to be asked for, and the deadlines run whether anyone told you about them or not. Roughly the order we would work through it on the phone.

Social Security, $255. A surviving spouse claims it; with no spouse it goes to a child who is 17 or under, 18 or 19 and still in school, or disabled before 21. Two years from the date of death and it is gone. 1-800-772-1213, weekdays 8:00 to 7:00, or start it through a my Social Security account. Offices now require an appointment, and the current list lives at ssa.gov/locator rather than on any funeral home page, this one included.

Veterans first, before anything else on this list. The nearest national cemetery accepting new interments is Tahoma, 18600 SE 240th Street near Kent, on 425-413-9614, with columbarium niches and in-ground cremation sites. Two closer options are dead ends worth knowing about so you do not chase them: Fort Lawton in Seattle takes only subsequent interments in graves that already exist, and Fort Worden at Port Townsend is closed. Across the mountains, the Washington State Veterans Cemetery at Medical Lake, 509-299-6280, accepts cremated remains at no charge for the veteran, though a family member interment carries a fee.

It is easier to grasp by what never reaches the family as a bill. Not the site. Not the labor of opening and closing it. Not the marker, which the government supplies, nor the flag, nor the Presidential Memorial Certificate. Maintenance of the grave is permanent and is also not charged. A cremation is not a lesser case there, and the VA is deliberate about saying so: cremated remains are inurned with the honors a casket receives. A spouse or dependent child comes at no cost too, their name added beneath the veteran’s on the same marker, and a widow or widower who married again after the veteran died has not lost the entitlement. Nothing is booked through the cemetery itself. It runs through the National Cemetery Scheduling Office on 1-800-535-1117, with discharge papers faxed ahead to 866-900-6417.

Separately there is money. A death unconnected to service draws $1,002 toward burial and $1,002 toward a plot at the rates effective October 1, 2025, on Form 21P-530EZ within two years. Choose a national cemetery and the plot half disappears, since there is no plot to reimburse. One or the other, never both. VA benefits, 1-800-827-1000.

Snohomish County’s Veterans Assistance Program sits at 3000 Rockefeller Avenue in the Drewel Building, Everett, on 425-388-7255, weekdays 8:00 to 11:00 and 1:00 to 4:00. Read what it publishes carefully: vouchers, case management and claims help, with no burial benefit and no dollar figure anywhere on the page. That is not the end of it. RCW 73.08.070 requires every county in this state to bear the disposition cost of an indigent veteran, or an indigent veteran’s family member, at not less than $300, and to reimburse relatives who paid it themselves. Three hundred is the floor the legislature set, not the benefit, and the ceiling is whatever the county chose. Ring them and ask for the statute by number.

For an enrolled tribal member, that call comes ahead of everything above. The Tulalip Tribes run Funeral Services from 6406 Marine Drive on 360-716-4000, for enrolled members and legal spouses. The Gathering Hall is opened for a service lasting a day or two, meals provided, with a blanket, a photographic display and a memorial video, and staff will coordinate casket, urn and obituary arrangements on the family’s behalf. Be careful what you infer from that list, because the only sum the Tribes put in writing is a $200 clothing allowance, and nothing published says they meet cremation charges. Ask rather than assume. Two other tribal governments in this county, the Stillaguamish on 360-652-7362 and the Sauk-Suiattle on 360-436-0131, publish no funeral program at all. For members of tribes elsewhere, Bureau of Indian Affairs assistance stands at $3,500 as of July 2024, handled by the Puget Sound Agency at 2707 Colby Avenue, Suite 1101 in Everett, on 425-622-9158.

If the death was a homicide, the state pays and hardly anyone says so. Crime Victims Compensation at Labor and Industries covers up to $7,990 for a death on or after July 1, 2023, plus twelve grief counseling sessions for immediate family. The two clocks are routinely quoted backwards, so here they are the right way round: the crime goes to police within one year of the crime, and the application goes in within three years of that police report, five in some circumstances. 1-800-762-3716.

Last on the list, and least, is the county’s statutory duty. Snohomish County discharges it through the Medical Examiner on 425-438-6200, under county code 2.74.061 and 2.74.062, and you should read it as a warning rather than as an offer. It reaches deaths where no relative can be traced or none is in a position to arrange anything. Understand the trade before you consider it: a family that cannot pay and steps back gives up the right to arrange the funeral at all, and the county then holds the remains for a year and a day while it searches for next of kin. The cost of that route is simply not measured in dollars.

Before it comes to any of that, call us. Sorting out what a family actually qualifies for takes about ten minutes and it is part of the job, not a favor.