Cremation Services

Correct, and it is unusual for a city of nearly thirty-five thousand. The Washington Department of Health hospital directory lists six hospitals in Pierce County and none of them has a University Place address.

The nearest is St. Clare Hospital at 11315 Bridgeport Way SW in Lakewood, on 253-985-1711, a 106 bed Level IV trauma center. Level IV means assess and move on, so a serious case goes north to Tacoma: St. Joseph Medical Center on South J Street or MultiCare Tacoma General on Martin Luther King Jr Way, both Level II. Children go to Mary Bridge.

What University Place has instead is care where people live, and almost all of it is on one street. Agility Health and Rehab at 5520 Bridgeport Way West is the city’s only skilled nursing facility, licensed for 120 beds. Bridgeport Place at 5250 is assisted living for 78. The Cottages at University Place on 64th Street West is memory care for 60, in three separate houses. Hearthside Manor on Drexler Drive West holds 36. And the hospice house, covered next, is at 2901 on the same road.

One street carries the skilled nursing, the largest assisted living and the region’s only inpatient hospice. We collect from all of them and from private homes, at any hour, and a hospice nurse can call us without going through you.

Franciscan Hospice House at 2901 Bridgeport Way West is, in Virginia Mason Franciscan Health’s own words, the only dedicated inpatient hospice care in the South Puget Sound. It opened in 2005. To begin hospice or palliative services the number is 253-534-7000; general information is 1-800-338-8305.

It is a building rather than a service that visits you: private rooms with sleeper sofas for family, nursing around the clock, a chapel, gardens, and music, art and massage therapy. It exists for people who need more medical care than can be managed at home.

Now the part that costs families money when they get it wrong. Medicare’s hospice benefit does not cover room and board. What it does cover is a short-term inpatient or respite stay that the hospice team arranges, and in that case Medicare pays for the stay in the facility, with a small copay on respite care. So a hospice-ordered admission to the Hospice House is covered. Living in a nursing home or assisted living while receiving routine home hospice is not: the hospice care is covered, the rent is yours.

That distinction, arranged by the hospice team versus simply residing somewhere, is the whole of it. If somebody tells you inpatient hospice is free, ask which of the two they mean.

Washington licenses this kind of building as a hospice care center, and it cannot be licensed on its own; it has to sit under a hospice agency. Franciscan Hospice and Palliative Care operates from the same campus.

The Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department handles it at 3629 South D Street in Tacoma, entrance at South 37th and D Street on the second floor, weekdays 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., no appointment needed. Vital records has a direct line, (253) 649-1401, which reaches the records desk without going through the health department’s main menu.

Unlike some of its neighbors, University Place has no county line problem. The city was carved out of unincorporated Pierce County in 1995 and sits wholly inside it. A death at home here, at St. Clare, at St. Joseph, at Tacoma General or at the hospice house is a Pierce County record every time. The only way out of Pierce jurisdiction is a death somewhere else entirely, and then the D Street counter cannot help you, because it holds Tacoma deaths from 1907 and Pierce County deaths from 1926 and nothing beyond.

Three prices, and the cheapest is the slowest. By mail is $33.00, which is the $25 certificate plus $4 mail processing and $4 authentication, shipped in one to two weeks. Walking in is $39.00, the same $25 plus a $14 processing and expedite fee, with a typical wait of twenty to thirty minutes and the copies in your hand. Online through VitalChek is $48.50, shipped within three business days of the order reaching them.

The $25 at the base of all three is fixed by state law under RCW 70.58A.560. Everything above it is county processing. So the six dollar gap between mail and counter is really the price of not waiting a fortnight.

We order certificates at $30 each and file the record for you, which removes the trip across Tacoma entirely.

The local answer changed in the last year, so ignore anything written before 2026.

The Suburban Times has closed. Its publisher, Ben Sclair, announced on October 7, 2025 that after more than twenty years he was shutting it down. For two decades it was the paper that covered this city.

Its successor is The Cascadian, founded by Philip Lindholm and Walter Neary, editing by Walter Neary and Steve Dunkelberger, forming as a nonprofit and publishing now. It covers thirteen communities including University Place, Lakewood, Steilacoom and Tacoma, and describes itself as inspired by the twenty year success of its predecessor. It runs a free community submission form. It publishes no obituary policy or rate, so if you want a notice there, ask them what they do rather than assuming.

The paid option is the Tacoma News Tribune, through Legacy, starting at $298.48 for print placement plus an online memorial and guest book. That is a starting figure and length and photographs raise it.

Ours is included, carries photographs and stays online permanently. For many families that is the only obituary they need, and there is no shame in that being the case.

Not city employees, and the reason goes back to how young this city is.

University Place incorporated in 1995, when about eight square miles of unincorporated Pierce County voted to become a city. It never built a police department. Pierce County’s own records describe University Place as one of only two contract cities in the county, the other being Edgewood: the University Place Police Department is a Pierce County Sheriff contract unit. So the deputy who attends an unattended death here is a county deputy, and the Pierce County Medical Examiner at 3619 Pacific Avenue in Tacoma, on 253-798-6494, holds jurisdiction.

Fire and medical response is West Pierce Fire and Rescue, formed on March 1, 2011 by merging the Lakewood and University Place fire departments. It covers 31 square miles across Lakewood, University Place and the Town of Steilacoom from six stations.

Both agencies that come to a death in this city are shared with the neighbors. That is not a criticism of either. It is simply why the names on the paperwork will say Pierce County and West Pierce rather than University Place, and why nobody should tell you the city is handling it.

You have a cemetery in the city, and its ownership is worth understanding before you compare it to anything else.

New Tacoma Cemeteries, Funeral Home and Crematory is at 9212 Chambers Creek Road West, on 253-564-1311, answered around the clock. Despite the name it is here in University Place, not in Tacoma. It describes itself as a registered not for profit, part of the local community since 1875, and says its profits are reinvested in the property rather than sent to an out of state corporate office. That is an unusual structure in this trade and it is the reason to call them. They publish their prices, and the ladder is worth knowing before you go. Direct cremation is $1,425 where you provide the container and the urn yourself and $1,575 with their cardboard sided box, plus tax. Neither figure includes an urn. Theirs run $40 to $1,700, caskets and containers $140 to $3,995, and tax is added to all of it.

Mountain View Funeral Home, Memorial Park and Crematory at 4100 Steilacoom Boulevard SW in Lakewood, on 253-243-0105, is the larger option. Know what it is: owned by NorthStar Memorial Group, a national consolidator. It publishes no cemetery prices and says openly that cost depends on the type of resting place and where it sits in the park.

For a veteran, Tahoma National Cemetery at 18600 SE 240th Street in Kent, on 425-413-9614. Its columbarium runs past twenty-six thousand niches, there are some six thousand in-ground cremation sites, and for an eligible family it costs nothing.

On scattering, Washington’s statute RCW 68.50.130 permits the state’s public navigable waters, and University Place has two miles of Puget Sound shoreline inside Chambers Creek Regional Park, 930 acres owned by Pierce County. The park’s published rules cover gatherings, amplified sound and tents but say nothing about scattering, so call the park office on 253-798-4141 rather than assuming either way.

We do not sell graves or niches and take nothing from any cemetery named here.

University Place buys its policing from the county and shares its fire district with two neighbors. The same pattern runs through everything below: almost nothing here comes from the city. Working out which government to ring is most of the task, so this is organized that way rather than as a list of benefits.

START WITH WHOEVER IS ALREADY INVOLVED. This is the University Place point and it is worth making first. A great many deaths in this city happen under hospice care, at the Hospice House on Bridgeport Way or at home with a hospice team visiting. If a hospice social worker is already assigned, that person is the fastest route to every item below. They do this weekly, they know which county desk is answering, and their help costs nothing. Families often thank the hospice team and then set about the paperwork alone, which is the wrong order.

THE COUNTY, WHICH IS ALSO YOUR CITY. Pierce County Veterans Services, 1501 Market Street, Suite 170 in Tacoma, on 253-798-7449. It is one of the few county offices in Washington that names burial among the things it will help with, covering a veteran, a spouse or a dependent child under 18. Help arrives as vouchers, not a check, and no figure is published, so this is a conversation rather than a form. Underneath it, RCW 73.08.070 requires every county in the state to meet the disposition cost of an indigent veteran at not less than $300, and to repay a relative who covered it. Quote the statute by number when you call; three hundred dollars is the legislature’s floor and the county sets its own ceiling above it.

THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, WHERE THE ACTUAL MONEY IS.

Social Security pays $255 and will never offer it. A surviving spouse claims first; failing that, a child 17 or under, 18 or 19 and in school, or disabled before 21. Two years and it lapses. 1-800-772-1213, weekdays 8:00 to 7:00, or through a my Social Security account. In-person visits need an appointment now.

For a veteran, an interment at Tahoma National Cemetery in Kent costs an eligible family nothing at all, cremated remains included, and there is a great deal of space there. The cemetery section above has the details. What that section does not cover is the money that sits alongside it: a death unconnected to service draws $1,002 toward burial and $1,002 toward a plot at the rates effective October 1, 2025, claimed on Form 21P-530EZ within two years. The two do not stack. Take the free interment and the plot allowance disappears, because there is no plot cost to reimburse. Whichever is worth more to your family, not both. VA benefits, 1-800-827-1000.

THE STATE, FOR ONE CIRCUMSTANCE. 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, along with grief counseling for immediate family. The deadlines run from the police report rather than the death, and they are widely quoted the wrong way round, so take them from the source: 1-800-762-3716.

Beneath all of that sits the county’s statutory duty for an unclaimed indigent decedent, administered by the Medical Examiner. It pays a funeral home rather than a family and it is what remains when nothing else applied. It is not something to plan around.

If money is the obstacle, say so before you sign anything at all. Ten minutes on the phone is usually enough to find what your family is entitled to, and signing first can close doors that were open.