Cremation Services

Usually in a care building or at home, and the numbers make the case better than any explanation.

Washington’s Department of Health lists three designated hospitals in this county, at Edmonds, Everett and Monroe. None of them is in Lynnwood. The nearest emergency department is Swedish Edmonds at 21601 76th Avenue West, on 425-640-4000, licensed for 217 beds and designated Level IV, which means stabilize and send on. The county’s only adult Level II is Providence Regional Medical Center Everett. South of the county line, UW Medical Center Northwest on North 115th Street is also a Level IV.

Two Providence facilities do carry Lynnwood addresses and neither is what people assume. The Providence Swedish Rehabilitation Hospital at 12911 Beverly Park Road, on 425-789-5400, opened on August 16, 2024 with 40 inpatient rehabilitation beds and no emergency department. The Providence Lynnwood Clinic at 2902 164th Street SW is primary care and sends walk-ins to Mill Creek. Neither takes a 911 call.

What Lynnwood has a great deal of is long-term care. Alderwood Post Acute on 188th Street SW is licensed for 113 skilled nursing beds and Lynnwood Post-Acute on the same street for 67. On the assisted living and memory care side, Chateau Pacific on 148th Street SW is licensed for 138, The Cottages at Lynnwood on 60th Avenue West for 72, Fairwinds Brighton Court on 196th Street SW for 65, Brookdale Alderwood on 36th Avenue West for 60 and Aegis of Lynnwood on 44th Avenue West for 52. Nearly four hundred licensed beds, in a city with no hospital ward to put anyone in.

Hospice arrived recently. AccentCare Hospice and Palliative Care of Snohomish County opened at 3400 188th Street SW on October 16, 2024, and it is the only agency on the state’s licensed in-home services list with a Lynnwood address and a hospice license. Ten other in-home agencies here are home health or home care, which is not the same thing and does not carry the same benefit. Understand also what the office is: a base for a team that travels to you. There is no hospice house in this county at all. Its own general line is 877-293-9099, and its program includes family grief counseling and a children’s bereavement camp.

We collect from every building named above, from private homes, and at any hour. A hospice or facility nurse can call us without waking you to do it.

It is the wealthiest local health body most Lynnwood residents have never heard of, its office is on 196th Street, and the honest answer to the second half of that question is: not directly, but through others, yes.

Verdant Health Commission is the trading name of Public Hospital District No. 2 of Snohomish County. Its offices and community wellness center are at 4710 196th Street SW, on (425) 582-9412, weekdays 8:00 to 5:00. It runs no hospital. It owns the Edmonds hospital buildings and leases them, and it spends the proceeds on everybody else’s programs, which its own superintendent has described as acting like a community health foundation.

The scale is worth knowing before you decide whether to call. Rental income runs about $11.2 million a year, reserves stand near $65 million, and the levy adds roughly $2.7 million for 2026 at five cents per thousand of assessed value, which is the line on your tax bill. For 2026 it committed $6.5 million in grants across 43 organizations. Its district covers about 180,000 people, following the Edmonds School District rather than any city boundary: Lynnwood, Edmonds, Mountlake Terrace, Brier, Woodway and part of Bothell.

Here is the catch, and it is the whole of it. Verdant gives to organizations, never to individuals. No family can apply for help with a funeral, and its stated 2026 priorities are food security, access to care, and youth mental health. Bereavement is not among them.

What that money does reach is the practical part. Lahai Health, at 19820 Scriber Lake Road, Suite 2, on (206) 363-4105, took $670,000 of the 2026 grants and provides medical, dental and licensed counseling on a suggested ten dollar donation per visit, weekdays 8:30 to 4:00. A widow with no insurance and no money can be sat down with a licensed counselor a mile from Alderwood Mall for essentially nothing. Another $850,000 of the same grant round went to food banks, the Lynnwood one included.

So the answer to give a grieving family is not the health district. It is the two places the health district pays for.

Unlike several of its neighbors, Lynnwood runs its own emergency services, and then hands the paperwork to two different offices in Everett that people constantly confuse.

The Lynnwood Police Department is the city’s own, a full service agency of more than a hundred employees at 19321 44th Avenue West, non-emergency 425-670-5600. Fire and medical is South County Fire, a regional fire authority that Lynnwood voters helped create in 2017 alongside unincorporated southwest Snohomish County. The city dates its formation to October 1, 2017. It now serves Lynnwood, Edmonds, Mountlake Terrace, Brier and Mill Creek, close to 300,000 people across 57 square miles from 15 stations, six of which carry Lynnwood addresses.

Now the two Everett offices, because being sent to the wrong one wastes a morning.

An unattended, sudden or suspicious death is investigated by the Snohomish County Medical Examiner, at 9509 29th Avenue West, out near Paine Field off Airport Road, on 425-438-6200. Open weekdays 9:00 to 4:00, with an investigator on call around the clock. Note that the county’s main web page shows the Rockefeller Avenue county campus instead, which is not where the office is.

The Medical Examiner does not issue death certificates and will tell you so. Those come from Snohomish County Vital Records at 3020 Rucker Avenue, Suite 104, on 425-339-5290. Expect $25.00 a copy, the figure state law sets. The two addresses are eight miles apart and serve entirely different purposes: one decides why a person died, the other sells you the proof that they did.

We order the certificates at $30 each and file the record ourselves, which is one of those two trips you never have to make.

You can, in three places, and not one of them publishes a price. That is unusual enough to be worth stating outright, because it changes how you should go about it.

The Lynnwood Times runs an active obituaries section. Its advertising page carries no rate card of any kind, in print or online, only a form that puts you in touch with a sales representative. MLTnews, which covers Mountlake Terrace and the neighborhoods along the south edge of the city, invites you to request an obituary and names no fee anywhere. The Everett Daily Herald says only that pricing depends on length and photographs.

Three outlets, three sales conversations, no published figure. So do it in this order. Ask for the price in writing before you send the text or the photograph, and ask specifically what changes it: word count, whether a photograph is extra, how many days of print, and whether an online memorial is included or billed on top. Those four questions are where the number moves. Nobody is hiding anything; small papers simply price case by case, and the family that asks first pays less than the family that sends a thousand words and receives an invoice.

Then decide whether you need a newspaper at all. An obituary on this site carries photographs, goes up as soon as you approve it, stays up permanently, and costs you nothing beyond what you have already paid. For a great many families that is the whole answer, and choosing it is not a smaller way to mark a life.

Start with the fact nobody says out loud. The City of Lynnwood does not own a cemetery. Its parks inventory runs to trails, a golf course, an amphitheater, a skate park and an off-leash area, and no burial ground. The word cemetery appears in the municipal code only as a zoning definition, describing a use the city permits rather than a place it operates.

There is exactly one cemetery inside the city, and a company on the New York Stock Exchange owns it. Floral Hills, at 409 Filbert Road, on 425-672-1800, shares its grounds with the Purdy and Walters funeral home. Both are Service Corporation International, trading as Dignity Memorial.

What it publishes is a set of starting-at tiles rather than a price list: cremation gardens from $2,000, columbaria from $2,000 and ground burial from $2,000. Three different kinds of property cannot all genuinely begin at the same round number, so read those as an invitation to telephone, not as the cost of a niche. No itemized cemetery schedule exists. The federal rule that forces funeral homes to hand you a written price list does not cover cemetery property, which is precisely why cemetery pricing is so much harder to pin down than cremation pricing.

If a published figure matters to you, the nearest one is over the line in Edmonds, where the city runs Edmonds Memorial Cemetery and Columbarium on 15th Street SW, 425-771-4741, and puts its whole fee schedule in public. Ask them what a non-resident pays, because that is the question a Lynnwood family has to ask and the schedule is written for residents. In Bothell, the mausoleum at Cedar Park is church affiliated rather than corporate, and publishes no niche prices either.

On scattering, remember that Lynnwood is landlocked. The state permits public navigable waters, and the nearest of those is a fifteen minute drive west. That is worth planning for rather than discovering on the day.

We sell no graves, no niches and no cemetery property of any kind, and receive nothing from anyone named here.

It changes two practical things, and in a city like this one it is worth saying so plainly rather than pretending everyone arrives at a death with the same paperwork.

Lynnwood is one of the most international cities in Washington by the numbers: 29.2 percent of residents were born outside the United States, and 37.5 percent speak a language other than English at home, according to the Census Bureau. The city’s own 2024 needs assessment breaks that down further, with Asian and Pacific Island languages at 13.8 percent and Spanish at 10.6 percent.

First, the name. Get the spelling settled before anything is filed, not afterward. Where a person’s name has been transliterated differently across a passport, a green card, a Social Security record and a hospital chart, the version that goes on the death certificate is the one every bank, insurer and consulate will then match against. Changing it later means a formal amendment to a state record rather than a phone call. Tell us at the start which spelling is the right one, and bring us the document it comes from.

Second, the timing. Several traditions ask for burial or cremation very quickly. We work at any hour and we do not charge more at night or over a weekend, so on our side there is nothing to slow you down. What sets the pace is the paperwork: the record has to be certified by the attending physician or, in a sudden death, released by the Medical Examiner, and no provider in this state can proceed before that. If speed matters to your family, say so in the first phone call, because there are a few places in that sequence where knowing to ask makes a real difference and several where it makes none at all.

Arrangements here are made by telephone and online, which for a family spread across time zones is usually easier than a room with fixed opening hours.

Begin with what does not exist, because it saves you a week of telephone calls. Neither the City of Lynnwood nor Snohomish County publishes a fund that pays toward a funeral or a cremation. The county’s own page on death benefits lists federal and state programs only, and names no county money at all. The city’s human services division keeps a referral list of some sixty agencies and administers no grants to individuals. So nobody local is going to hand your family a check, and any advice that starts with “apply to the city” is wrong.

What actually exists divides in two. There is national money, which is modest and comes with clocks on it. And there is a local network in this city that will not pay the cremation but will hold up the household around it, and that second half is the part almost nobody is told about.

THE NATIONAL MONEY, BRIEFLY.

Social Security, $255, once. A surviving spouse, or failing that a child 17 or under, 18 or 19 and still at school, or disabled before 21. It is never offered and it expires two years from the death. 1-800-772-1213, weekdays 8:00 to 7:00, or through a my Social Security account.

For a veteran, two things that do not combine. An interment at Tahoma National Cemetery near Kent, 425-413-9614, costs an eligible family nothing, cremated remains included. A death unrelated to service instead 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. Take the free ground and the plot half falls away, since there is nothing to reimburse. VA benefits, 1-800-827-1000. Snohomish County’s Veterans Assistance Program on 425-388-7255 publishes no burial figure, but RCW 73.08.070 obliges every county in this state to meet an indigent veteran’s disposition cost at not less than $300. Ask them for the statute by number.

If the death was a homicide, Washington pays up to $7,990 toward the funeral through Crime Victims Compensation at Labor and Industries, for a death on or after July 1, 2023, with grief counseling for immediate family. Report the crime within a year, file within three years of that report. 1-800-762-3716. Bureau of Indian Affairs assistance for an enrolled member of a tribe stands at $3,500, through the Puget Sound Agency in Everett on 425-622-9158.

THE LOCAL NETWORK, WHICH IS WHERE LYNNWOOD IS ACTUALLY BETTER OFF THAN ITS NEIGHBORS.

Homage has its headquarters here, at 5026 196th Street SW, on 425-513-1900. It is the agency on aging for this county and the same building runs the Family Caregiver Support Program, Meals on Wheels and senior dining, care coordination and transportation. If the person who died was the one being cared for, or the one doing the caring, this is the first number on the page.

Lahai Health, 19820 Scriber Lake Road, Suite 2, on (206) 363-4105, weekdays 8:30 to 4:00, provides medical, dental and licensed counseling for a suggested donation of ten dollars a visit. Grief counseling on a widow’s budget, in Lynnwood, is a genuinely rare thing and it is funded by the local health district.

The Lynnwood Food Bank, 5320 176th Street SW, 425-745-1635, open Wednesday and Friday, sets no eligibility restrictions, accommodates halal and other dietary needs, and lets you authorize somebody else to collect for you. In the first weeks, when nobody in the house is fit to drive, that last provision is the one that matters.

The city’s own reduced utility rate is small, real, and easy to miss. Income-qualified households pay less for water, sewer and storm. A surviving spouse whose income has just halved often qualifies and almost never applies. Ask through humanservices@lynnwoodwa.gov.

Where children are involved, Washington Kids in Transition at 19721 Scriber Lake Road, Suite B, on 425-361-2916, helps Edmonds School District families who have lost their footing, which is what a death often does to housing.

For grief itself, the county names two eight-week groups at Swedish Edmonds, one for survivors of suicide and one for sudden and traumatic loss, both on (425) 640-4404, and Camp Erin for children. The hospice on 188th Street runs its own family grief counseling and a children’s camp. And where a parent has lost a child aged 13 to 20, Cali’s Gift, through the Tears Foundation, is the one program on any county list that helps with funeral costs directly.

If money is the obstacle, say so on the first call and before you sign anything. Working out what your family is entitled to takes about ten minutes and it is part of the job.