Cremation Services

We cover seven counties in two metros. Around Portland that is Washington, Clackamas, Multnomah and Clark; to the north, King, Pierce and Snohomish. Our licensed arrangement counselors work from King County and the crematory and transportation center on this side is in Portland, about twelve miles up I-5 from the Nyberg interchange.

Twenty minutes each way in ordinary traffic, longer through the Terwilliger curves at the wrong hour. Any hour, any day, no surcharge for a night, a weekend or a holiday.

The honest part, up front rather than buried. We have no premises anywhere and you cannot come in. No arrangement room, no waiting area, no front desk in Tualatin or in Portland. That is not a limitation we apologize for; it is where the money goes in a traditional funeral and the reason ours costs $1,194. Everything is completed online or by telephone with a licensed arranger, whenever you are able. Some families need to be in a room with someone, and that is a legitimate need rather than a preference to be talked out of. If it is yours, use a funeral home that offers it.

Legacy Meridian Park Medical Center at 19300 SW 65th Avenue, on 503-692-1212, is the hospital in Tualatin itself, straight off I-5 at Exit 289. It runs an emergency department around the clock alongside surgical, maternity, oncology and psychiatric services. Families in half a dozen surrounding towns come here, which is why neighboring city pages describe it as the nearest hospital rather than a local one. For Tualatin it is simply the hospital.

Anything highly specialized goes north into Portland. Meridian Park is a community hospital and is not the place for a major trauma.

Hospice is where this city is better provided for than its size suggests. Two licensed agencies keep Tualatin addresses, which is unusual for twenty-eight thousand people: Brighton Hospice at 8050 SW Warm Springs Street and Legacy Hospice Services at 6475 SW Borland Road. Note where that second one sits. Borland Road is on the Clackamas side of the line, so a family served by Legacy Hospice is being visited from the other county without anyone mentioning it.

Three more agencies are minutes up the road in Tigard, on Hall Boulevard, Hampton Street and Durham Road, and Wilsonville adds three to the south.

We collect from the hospital, from care facilities and from private homes on both sides of the freeway, at any hour of any day. A hospice nurse can call us directly.

Which counter depends on the county of death, and the toggle above explains how to work out which one that is. Here are both, with the differences that matter.

Washington County issues from Vital Records at 155 N First Avenue, Suite 170, in Hillsboro, inside the Charles D. Cameron Public Services Building, on 503-846-3538. Weekdays 8:30 to 4:30, with a handful of late openings each month, so check the day before you set off.

Clackamas County issues from 2051 Kaen Road, Suite 367, in Oregon City, on 503-655-8406. The county works a four day week: Monday to Thursday, 7:00 to 6:00, closed Fridays. Long days, but no Friday at all.

Both charge $25.00 per certified copy, first and additional alike. In person either will take cash, card, check or money order; by post it must be a check or money order.

Both stop at six months. Not five, whatever you may read elsewhere. After six months from the date of death the record moves to Oregon Health Authority state vital records on 971-673-1190, where a mailed order runs three to five weeks. That is a good argument for ordering everything you might need while the county can still print it in an afternoon.

We order certificates at $30 each and file the record in whichever county it belongs to. Working out which one that is, is our job.

There is no Tualatin paper. The title that covers this city is The Times, which serves Tigard and Tualatin together, and it is run from an office in Lake Oswego at 400 2nd Street, open Tuesdays and Thursdays. That is worth knowing before you go looking for a local counter that does not exist.

The submission itself is a web form and it asks you to select which communities the notice should appear in, from a list of two dozen. Choose deliberately. A Tualatin family with relatives in Sherwood, Wilsonville or Tigard can have the notice appear in all of them, and most people accept the default and never notice the option.

The desk is 503-492-5143. Somebody rings you back to confirm the wording and take payment; the maximum is two photographs; and there is no published rate, since cost is quoted from word count on the callback.

Two things have changed recently and older pages have not caught up. Carpenter Media Group bought Pamplin in June 2024, and the Portland Tribune stopped printing in June 2025 and is now online only, so a print Tribune obituary is no longer a thing that can be bought at any price.

The Oregonian is the regional option, on 1-844-209-0738, and includes a permanent memorial page, though the cost is not revealed until you are partway through the order.

What we publish here carries photographs, has no word limit worth worrying about, and is already paid for.

Oregon has no law about this. No statute, no permit, no register. Cremated remains may be kept at home, divided among family, buried, or scattered on private land with the owner’s consent. Families arriving from Washington, where the whole subject is governed by RCW 68.50.130, usually find that hard to believe.

The exception is land the federal government owns, and Tualatin has a sizeable piece of it inside the city limits.

The Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge is federal land, and scattering on federal land generally requires a permit with rules that differ from one agency to the next. It is the most beautiful place in town and the obvious one to think of, which is exactly why it needs a phone call to the refuge before anything is planned rather than after. The same applies to any Bureau of Land Management or Forest Service ground you might have in mind further out.

The river itself, where it runs past private property, is a question of whose bank you are standing on rather than of state law.

Scattering at sea, arranged formally through us, is $195.

Winona Cemetery is the burial ground in Tualatin itself, and it is small and historic rather than a full-service memorial park. Call before making plans, since it publishes nothing about cremation options online.

The fuller option is a few miles north. Crescent Grove Cemetery and Mausoleum, 9925 SW Greenburg Road in Tigard, on 503-639-5347, has indoor columbarium niches inside the mausoleum, urn gardens and a scatter garden, with pre-arrangement plans available. It publishes no price list either, so both of these are a telephone call rather than a website visit.

For a veteran, Willamette National Cemetery at 11800 SE Mount Scott Boulevard in Portland, on 503-273-5250, has space for both casketed and cremated remains, at no cost to an eligible family. The assistance section below sets out what that covers.

Cemetery arrangements are made directly between you and the cemetery. We take nothing from either side of that transaction and sell no memorial property ourselves.

One consequence of living on a county line is that some help follows the county rather than the address, and a Tualatin family can end up sent to the wrong office by somebody being helpful. Sorting that out first saves the rest.

Your county veteran service office depends on which side of I-5 you are on, and they are forty minutes apart. Washington County Veteran Services is at 5240 NE Elam Young Parkway, Suite 300, Hillsboro, on 503-846-3060. Clackamas County Veteran Services is at 2051 Kaen Road, Suite 281, Oregon City, on 503-650-5631, by appointment only with a published wait of four to five weeks. Either will file VA paperwork for you free of charge and get it right, which is worth considerably more than doing it yourself at speed. Statewide backup is the Oregon Department of Veterans’ Affairs on 1-800-692-9666.

What the VA itself provides does not change with the county. Willamette National Cemetery, 11800 SE Mount Scott Boulevard in Portland, on 503-273-5250, accepts cremated remains as readily as casketed ones, and an eligible family is not billed for any part of the interment. Six things are covered and it is worth naming them, because families routinely budget for two or three: the ground itself, the work of opening and closing it, permanent upkeep, a government marker, a burial flag, and a Presidential Memorial Certificate. A cremation carries the same honors as a casket. A spouse or dependent child is inscribed on the veteran’s marker at no charge, and a later remarriage does not end that. Scheduling is done centrally on 1-800-535-1117, not by ringing the cemetery, and discharge papers go to 1-866-900-6417 first.

There is a cash allowance as well, $1,002 toward burial and $1,002 toward a plot for a non-service-connected death, at the rates effective October 1, 2025, on Form 21P-530EZ within two years of the burial. The two do not combine. Choosing a national cemetery removes the plot allowance, because there is no plot expense to reimburse. VA benefits, 1-800-827-1000.

Social Security pays a $255 lump sum and nobody will send it unprompted. It goes to a surviving spouse, or absent one, to a child 17 or under, 18 or 19 and in school, or disabled before 21. Two years from the date of death. 1-800-772-1213, weekdays 8:00 to 7:00.

Tualatin sits closer to Grand Ronde than most of this metro, so if the person was an enrolled member of a federally recognized tribe, that call comes before everything above. The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde pay up to $7,000 toward funeral services and $400 toward a reception, for enrolled members and their spouses, parents and children under 25, and they prefer the funeral home to make contact rather than the family. Member Services on 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 death beneficiary benefit, paid to providers in a fixed order rather than to relatives; 541-444-2532, or 541-272-4091 after hours. Bureau of Indian Affairs burial assistance for indigent enrolled members has been $3,500 since July 2024, through the Northwest Regional Office at 911 NE 11th Avenue in Portland.

Where the death was a homicide, the state pays the provider directly. Oregon’s Crime Victims’ Compensation program at the Department of Justice covers up to $5,000 to the funeral service provider, with more possible case by case, plus grief counseling for the family. 503-378-5348 or 1-800-503-7983, or through the district attorney’s victim assistance office in whichever county the crime occurred. Ask about the filing deadlines on that call: the Department of Justice publishes neither of them on its current pages, and the figures circulating online come from a source last revised in 2009.

One structural thing to understand, because it is the reverse of how Washington works. Neither Washington County nor Clackamas County runs an indigent cremation program. Oregon handles it centrally, through the Oregon Mortuary and Cemetery Board under ORS 97.170, on 971-673-1504, and that program reimburses the funeral establishment rather than paying the family, applies only where a body is unclaimed, and is capped well below the cost of a cremation. Its own guidance is unambiguous: once anyone arranges to pay, the person is no longer indigent in law.

Which means the sequence matters. If cost is the obstacle, tell us before you sign anything. A ten minute conversation is usually enough to find out what your family is actually entitled to, and it is a great deal better than finding out afterward.