Cremation Services

PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center, 400 NE Mother Joseph Place, is licensed for 450 beds and is the only designated trauma center in Southwest Washington, a state-designated Level II handling around three thousand trauma patients a year and overseeing trauma quality across six counties. Most Vancouver residents who die in the hospital die there.

Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center at 2211 NE 139th Street opened in 2005 and is the other full hospital in the city. It is not a state-designated trauma center, which is worth knowing rather than assuming.

One warning that matters more than it sounds. The Vancouver VA Medical Center at 1601 East Fourth Plain Boulevard has no emergency services. It is an outpatient campus of the Portland VA system with a community living center. Taking someone there in an emergency is a genuine local mistake.

Clark County has exactly one Medicare-certified hospice agency: PeaceHealth Southwest Hospice, 5400 MacArthur Boulevard, on 360-696-5100, certified since 1984. There is a reason for that, and it is regulatory rather than commercial. Washington requires a certificate of need review before a hospice can seek Medicare certification; Oregon does not apply certificate of need to hospice at all. The result is twelve agencies with Portland addresses and one in the whole of Clark County, which is why Vancouver families often end up on an Oregon agency’s service list. The same building holds the Hope Bereavement Center, on 360-696-5120.

What Clark County does have, and what makes it better provided for than either of the other metros we serve, is a dedicated inpatient hospice house. The PeaceHealth Ray Hickey Hospice House is at 2112 East Mill Plain Boulevard, on 360-514-4350, and it is open around the clock. PeaceHealth describes it as a home-like setting providing “a comfortable and dignified transition toward the end of life for patients with terminal illnesses,” with hospice, bereavement and spiritual care on site. Set that against the alternatives: Snohomish County has no free-standing hospice house at all, and Portland’s nearest equivalent is licensed as a residential care home whose room and board Medicare does not cover. Ask about coverage when you call, because the answer differs by facility and by benefit, but a family in Vancouver has an option that families thirty miles south do not.

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

Clark County Public Health, Vital Records, is at 1601 E Fourth Plain Boulevard, Building 17, Suite A327, on 564-397-8092. In person takes twenty to thirty minutes; mail and online orders ship within three business days. The counter is closed on Tuesdays for in-person service, which catches people out.

Clark charges on a different pattern from its neighbors. The first certified copy is $38.50, additional copies are $25.00 each, and there is a $10.00 order fee per transaction, so five copies in one order comes to $148.50.

You are not confined to this counter. A Washington death registered in the statewide electronic system can generally be issued by any local health department in the state, though the earliest year each office reaches varies, so call ahead. What no Washington office can do is issue an Oregon record, and in this city that comes up constantly: a Vancouver resident who dies at a Portland hospital is an Oregon death and the certificate is an Oregon certificate. We handle either, and order certificates at $30 each.

The Columbian publishes a free death notice, and it is one of very few papers in either metro that says so plainly. The form at columbian.com is headed exactly that, and takes the name, age, date and place of death and the funeral home. Paid obituaries run separately through its Legacy portal, with no published rate.

The Columbian is worth a word on its own account. It has been owned by the Campbell family since 1921, four generations, and is one of the few remaining daily newspapers in the country still in local family hands. It prints Tuesday through Sunday, with Monday as an electronic edition only.

The Camas-Washougal Post-Record, also Campbell-owned, moved its newsroom into the Columbian’s building in January 2025 and now operates from 701 West 8th Street here in Vancouver. It offers both a free death notice, a short mention without photographs, and a paid full obituary. The Reflector in Battle Ground changed hands in mid 2026 and a publishing hiatus was reported, so call 360-687-5151 before counting on it. A complete obituary on this site, with photographs, is included in our price at no charge.

Washington’s statute is RCW 68.50.130, and the Department of Licensing lists what it permits: the state’s public navigable waters, including rivers, streams and lakes, which covers the Columbia; private land with the owner’s consent; national parks with the chief park ranger’s permission; and state trust uplands with the Department of Natural Resources.

Their one practical instruction: scatter only the contents, and dispose of the container separately along with the identification disc inside it.

And here is the number nobody expects. The City of Vancouver will scatter ashes at one of its own cemeteries for $100, on a published price list. If a formal place to scatter matters to your family, that is the cheapest verified option anywhere in our service area. Scattering at sea is available through us for $195.

This is the best-documented cemetery answer we can give on any of our pages, because the City of Vancouver owns three cemeteries and publishes a flat price list with no resident and non-resident split. Park Hill Cemetery at 5915 East Mill Plain Boulevard, on 360-693-1562, is the working one, with more than 25,000 burials and still open. Old City Cemetery and Fisher Cemetery, the latter dating to 1852 and the oldest pioneer ground in Clark County, are the others.

From the city’s own schedule: a double columbarium niche is $1,601.00 with a $300.00 opening and closing. A cremated remains grave, 24 by 24 inches, is $600.00 with a $300.00 interment. Ash scattering is $100.00. A flat memorial second right of interment is $295.00. You will not find that kind of transparency at a private cemetery in this region.

The private alternative is Evergreen Memorial Gardens at 1101 NE 112th Avenue, on 360-892-6060, and it is worth saying what it is: independent and family owned, in the Carlson family since 1968 and now in its third generation, with its own crematory on site. In a market where most memorial parks belong to national groups, that is unusual. It offers outdoor and solid-front columbaria, scattering gardens with a permanent marker, urn burial and cremation benches, but publishes no cemetery prices.

We do not sell cemetery property and take no commission on it.

None of what follows is offered by the people who owe it. It has to be asked for. This is the order we would ask in.

Social Security’s lump-sum death payment is $255. It is not automatic and it will not find you. A surviving spouse claims it; failing that, a child under 18, or under 20 and still in school, or disabled before 21. Two years to apply. Call 1-800-772-1213, weekdays 8:00 to 7:00. Some people can now begin through a my Social Security account. Walk-ins are no longer the norm, so book an appointment and find your office at ssa.gov/locator.

If the person was a veteran, start here before anything else. This is the fact most Clark County funeral home pages still miss, and for a family choosing cremation it is the best news on the page. Vancouver Barracks National Cemetery is here in the city, at 1455 East Fourth Plain Boulevard, transferred to the National Cemetery Administration in 2020 and open daily from sunrise to sunset. The VA lists its status as cremation only, which for the families we serve is exactly the right thing rather than a limitation. It is administered from Willamette at 503-273-5250. Willamette National Cemetery in Portland remains the choice if a casketed burial is wanted.

The VA states it plainly, so we will use its words. Included at no cost to the family: a gravesite where there is space, opening and closing of the grave, perpetual care, a Government headstone or marker, a burial flag, and a Presidential Memorial Certificate. Cremated remains are inurned “in the same manner and with the same honors as casketed remains.” The same applies to a spouse or dependent child, with one difference worth knowing: their name goes on the veteran’s headstone rather than a marker of their own. A surviving spouse who remarried after the veteran’s death is still eligible. Interments are scheduled centrally, not by the cemetery: 1-800-535-1117, with discharge documentation faxed to 866-900-6417.

The VA also pays an allowance. A non-service-connected death draws $1,002 for burial and $1,002 for a plot at the rates effective October 1, 2025, claimed on Form 21P-530EZ within two years of the burial. Mind the interaction, because families budget for both and receive one: the plot allowance is not paid where the interment is in a national cemetery. That includes Vancouver Barracks. 1-800-827-1000 is the number.

The Clark County Veterans Assistance Fund pays up to $2,000 toward a burial or cremation, which is the largest county-level sum available anywhere we serve. It is run by the Clark County Veterans Assistance Center at 907 Harney Street, Suite 200, weekdays 9:00 to 4:00, on (360) 693-7030 or 564-397-8478 direct to the fund, vetfund@ccvac.net. Check that address against anything else you have been handed: they moved in 2025 and stale listings are everywhere, the county’s own page among them. Qualifying takes a DD-214 with an honorable or general discharge, twelve consecutive months of Washington residency, current Clark County residency, and household income within 200 percent of the federal poverty guideline.

The Cowlitz Indian Tribe is the federally recognized tribe here and it publishes a real benefit: up to $4,000 toward a funeral for an enrolled member or their spouse, handled by the Enrollment Department at (360) 577-8140, press 3, or enrollment@cowlitz.org. The Vancouver office is at 7700 NE 26th Avenue, 360-397-8228, and the reservation is up at Ridgefield. Bureau of Indian Affairs burial assistance of up to $3,500 is separately available to indigent enrolled members. One point we would rather state precisely, because it is often got wrong locally: the Chinook Indian Nation is not federally recognized. The Supreme Court declined its petition in March 2026, and the state recognition passed that same month is a different thing and carries no federal burial benefit.

If this was a homicide, do not pay for the cremation before reading this. Washington’s Crime Victims Compensation Program, at Labor and Industries, pays up to $7,990 toward funeral and burial expenses for a death on or after July 1, 2023, and provides grief counseling for immediate family. The crime has to have been reported to law enforcement within a year, and the application must arrive within three years of that report. Call 1-800-762-3716.

Where a family truly has nothing, Washington law obliges the county to act. RCW 36.39.030 requires it to arrange disposition for a person who dies indigent in the county and whose body is unclaimed by relatives or a church, and in Clark County that falls to the Medical Examiner’s Office, which cremates at county expense. It is uncommon: 26 of the 4,557 deaths here in 2023. And it is not what people usually picture. There is no application form and no published income test, and it turns on the body being unclaimed. If that may be your situation, call 564.397.8405, or go to 1300 West Franklin Street, Suite 191, and talk it through before you decide anything.

If none of these apply, tell us before you make any decision about money. That conversation costs nothing and it fairly often turns something up.