Cremation Services

St. Anthony Hospital, 11567 Canterwood Boulevard NW, on 253-530-2000, is the hospital on the peninsula. It belongs to Virginia Mason Franciscan Health and runs a Level IV trauma emergency department around the clock. Level IV is a designation about scope, not quality: it means assess, stabilize and move on. St. Anthony was built at that size deliberately, and it works.

So anything serious crosses the Narrows. Since November 2024 both St. Joseph Medical Center on South J Street and MultiCare Tacoma General on Martin Luther King Jr Way have run Level II trauma every day of the week; before that they alternated days between them, which is a detail worth forgetting now. The most severe cases carry on to Harborview in Seattle.

No licensed hospice agency has a Gig Harbor street address. The peninsula is served from across the bridge. Franciscan Hospice House at 2901 Bridgeport Way West in University Place, on 253-534-7000, is the only dedicated inpatient hospice in the South Sound. MultiCare’s PNW Hospice works from Broadway in Tacoma on 253-301-6490.

Where Gig Harbor is genuinely well supplied is residential care, and it is where most of the deaths we attend here happen. Gig Harbor Health and Rehabilitation on 45th Street Court is licensed for 120 beds, Cottesmore of Life Care for 108, Gig Harbor Court for 100, Harbor Place at Cottesmore for 90, Greenlake Senior Living for 60 and Brookdale Harbor Bay on North Harborview Drive for 44.

We come to any of them, and to homes on Fox Island, the Key Peninsula, Purdy and Wauna, at any hour of any day. A hospice nurse can call us directly without going through the family.

Our partner crematory and transportation center are in Kent, about thirty miles out by I-5 and SR 16. Clear of traffic that is roughly forty minutes. Through Tacoma at five in the afternoon it is not, and when you call we will give you an honest arrival window rather than a hopeful one.

On the toll, the geography works in your favor and almost nobody realizes it. The Tacoma Narrows toll is collected eastbound only, toward Tacoma. Coming out to your family is free; the charge falls on the trip back. Either way it is our cost, it is fixed rather than time-of-day, and it does not appear anywhere on your statement.

One correction to something repeated on a lot of local pages. The Narrows bridge is not the only road out of Gig Harbor. SR 16 runs north through Purdy and Port Orchard to Gorst, so the peninsula is joined by land to Kitsap County. It is the only crossing to Tacoma, which is a different claim and the true one.

Gig Harbor, Fox Island, Purdy, Wauna and the Key Peninsula are all the same price. Distance is our problem, not yours.

The Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department handles vital records at 3629 South D Street in Tacoma, on 253-649-1401, weekdays 8:00 to 4:30, opening at 9:30 on the last Tuesday of the month. It holds Tacoma deaths from 1907 and Pierce County deaths from 1926, and issues short-form certificates for anything filed electronically since January 1, 2018.

The quoted fee and the actual fee are not the same number, and the gap is not small. State law sets the certificate itself at $25.00 under RCW 70.58A.560. Pierce County then adds its own processing on top and publishes the totals plainly, which is more than most counties do:

$33.00 by mail. $39.00 walking in. $48.50 online through VitalChek. Mail orders must be paid by check or money order; in person takes cash, check or card. Budget from the total, not from the twenty-five.

Separately, Pierce County has charged a $100.00 disposition authorization on every death in the county since August 3, 2026, whether or not the medical examiner certified it. That is a Pierce County cost that families crossing from a Kitsap or King County death do not carry, it applies to every funeral home working here including us, and we itemize it rather than folding it into a package price.

We order certificates at $30 each and file the record for you, which spares you the drive over the bridge and the question of which fee schedule applies.

Here the small local outlet beats the metro daily outright, and it beats it on price by the whole price.

Gig Harbor Now publishes obituaries at no cost. It is the nonprofit newsroom covering the peninsula, donations are welcomed and nothing is required, and it takes submissions from families directly as well as from funeral homes. Up to five thousand characters, which is eight hundred to twelve hundred words and more room than any paid notice will give you. A headshot is required. It runs every Wednesday, with an 8:00 a.m. Tuesday deadline to make that week. The number is 253-357-5588. Eligibility is simply a Gig Harbor connection: lived here at the end or earlier, or went to school here.

The Peninsula Gateway has been the paper of record on this side of the water for decades and is McClatchy-owned. It publishes no obituary rate, and we could not confirm that a print edition still runs, so ask before you build a plan around it.

The Tacoma News Tribune places through Legacy and starts at $298.48 for newspaper publication with an online guest book. Starting is the operative word; length and photographs move it upward and the full rate card is not published.

The obituary we build on this site carries photographs, stays up permanently, and is already covered by what you have paid.

Living on a peninsula turns out to be an advantage here, because navigable water is the most permissive category in the statute and you are surrounded by it.

RCW 68.50.130 is the law, and the Department of Licensing publishes what it allows. Public navigable waters are on that list by name. In practice that covers the harbor itself, Henderson Bay, Carr Inlet, Colvos Passage and the Narrows, from a boat or from the shoreline. If your family has a place on the water, that is private land and needs only the owner’s consent, which if it is your own place means nobody’s.

The instruction that gets overlooked: the contents go in the water and nothing else does. Dispose of the container in the ordinary way, and the numbered metal disc inside it with the household rubbish rather than over the side.

Two places nearby are not covered by any of the above. State parks are agency land, so Kopachuck and Penrose Point need the park’s approval before you scatter from the beach, though from a boat offshore you are back in navigable water and it does not arise. Mount Rainier is a national park and requires a permit.

If a formal scattering at sea suits you better than doing it yourselves, we arrange that for $195.

Gig Harbor is one of the last markets we work in where the main cemetery is still what it appears to be.

Haven of Rest Funeral Home and Memorial Park, 8503 State Route 16 NW, on 253-851-9991, has been in the same family since 1964, when Richard and Ruth Berg bought the grounds a local funeral home had established a decade earlier and gave them the name. It runs today within the Weeks family group. There is a mausoleum, columbarium niches and niche walls, urn and cremation gardens, and a crematory on the property. It is not a Dignity Memorial or Service Corporation International cemetery, which in this trade has become worth saying out loud. Its funeral home price list is published, though you have to know to look under the menu item marked Services to find it. The cemetery side publishes nothing, so niche and urn garden costs remain a telephone call.

The two historic grounds are smaller and quieter. Gig Harbor Cemetery on Gig Harbor Drive NW is the town’s original pioneer burial ground, run by the Gig Harbor Cemetery Association and holding around ten Civil War veterans. Artondale Cemetery was established in 1895 on land the Hunt family donated and is maintained by a nonprofit association. Neither publishes prices or describes a cremation section online, so call before you count on either one.

For a veteran, the answer is Tahoma National Cemetery in Kent, and the assistance section below explains what it costs, which is nothing.

We have no financial interest in any of this. No cemetery property is sold through us and no commission reaches us from any of the places named above.

Pierce County has more money available for funeral costs than most counties in this state, and a good deal of it goes unclaimed every year because nobody is required to tell a family it exists. In the order we would go through it with you.

Start with the Puyallup Tribe if it applies, because it is the largest published benefit in this region. The Tribe pays up to $6,000 in funeral expense assistance for a tribal member, $750 for a miscarriage or stillbirth, and $750 once toward a non-member relative of a member. It covers casket, urn, travel, the funeral dinner, and items like clothing and flowers, and Tribal Council donates a Pendleton blanket. Separate hardship assistance of up to $2,000 per category is available to the spouse or head of household. The funeral department is at 3507 East McKinley Avenue in Tacoma, on 253-573-7884, weekdays 8:00 to 5:00. For an enrolled member of any other tribe, Bureau of Indian Affairs burial assistance is $3,500 as of July 2024, applied for within 180 days of the death, through the Puget Sound Agency on 425-622-9158.

Social Security pays $255 and will not volunteer it. The claim belongs to a surviving spouse first, then to a child 17 or under, 18 or 19 and in school, or disabled before 21. The window is two years and it does not stretch. 1-800-772-1213 on a weekday between 8:00 and 7:00; a my Social Security account can start some claims online; in-person visits need an appointment made in advance.

For a veteran, the ground itself is free and the nearest of it is Tahoma National Cemetery, 18600 SE 240th Street in Kent, on 425-413-9614, which happens to be the same city as our crematory. Space is not the constraint there that it is at older cemeteries: the columbarium holds more than twenty-six thousand niches, with around six thousand in-ground cremation sites besides. The VA covers the site, its opening and closing, perpetual care, a government marker, a burial flag and a Presidential Memorial Certificate, at no cost, and treats cremated remains exactly as it treats casketed ones. A spouse or dependent child is included on the veteran’s marker, and remarriage after the veteran’s death does not end eligibility. Book through the National Cemetery Scheduling Office on 1-800-535-1117, faxing discharge papers to 866-900-6417 first.

There is also cash: $1,002 toward burial and $1,002 toward a plot for a death unrelated to service, at the rates effective October 1, 2025, claimed on Form 21P-530EZ within two years. The trap is that the plot half only pays where there was a plot to pay for, so choosing Tahoma forfeits it. Take the free interment or take the plot allowance, not both. VA benefits, 1-800-827-1000.

Pierce County Veterans Services actually lists burial, which most Washington counties do not. The office is at 1501 Market Street, Suite 170, Tacoma, on 253-798-7449, weekdays 8:00 to 4:30, and it names burial expenses for a veteran, a spouse or a dependent child under 18 among the things it helps with. Assistance comes as vouchers rather than cash and no dollar figure is published. Underneath it sits RCW 73.08.070, which obliges every county in Washington to bear an indigent veteran’s disposition cost at not less than $300. That is a statutory floor, not an offer, and the county sets its own ceiling.

One warning about the county’s own website. Its VA benefits summary page still publishes federal figures of $2,000 and $300 and notes that it is current as of July 2009. Those numbers were superseded years ago. Use the ones above.

Where the death was a homicide, Washington pays toward the funeral. Crime Victims Compensation at Labor and Industries covers up to $7,990 for a death on or after July 1, 2023, plus up to twelve grief counseling sessions for immediate family. Two separate deadlines, and they are commonly reported the wrong way round: the crime must reach law enforcement within one year, and the application must follow within three years of that report. 1-800-762-3716.

Last and least, the county’s statutory backstop, which exists but is not a benefit you apply for. Pierce County Code chapter 8.92 has the Medical Examiner at 3619 Pacific Avenue, on 253-798-6494, administer disposition for an indigent person whose body is unclaimed. It reimburses the funeral home, never the family, it requires proof that relatives could not be found, and its rates are set internally rather than published. Read it as the floor beneath the floor.

If cost is the obstacle, tell us that before you sign anything at all. Working out what your family is entitled to is ordinary work here, not a favor, and it is a good deal quicker than borrowing.