Writing An Obituary That Says Something True

An obituary is often the only written record of a life that outsiders will ever read, and most are written in a house style that removes everything distinguishing about the person.

The template is doing two jobs

Historically the notice served an announcement function, telling a community that someone had died and when the service would be, which required a fixed set of facts.

That template survives: name, age, place, family members, career summary, service details. It is efficient and it produces near-identical text for entirely different lives.

The two purposes can be separated. A short factual notice can carry the arrangements while a longer piece does the remembering.

Specificity is what people recognize

Adjectives do very little. Describing someone as devoted or generous tells a reader nothing they could not have guessed from the fact that an obituary was written.

Concrete details do the work instead: what the person cooked, what they argued about, the route they walked, the phrase they used constantly.

Those details are also what mourners respond to, because they recognize the person rather than a summary of a person.

Deciding who appears

The list of survivors is where family politics surface, since inclusion, order and how relationships are described all carry weight in a public document.

Blended families, estranged relatives and long-term unmarried partners all require a decision, and omission is read as a statement whether or not it was meant as one.

Agreeing the wording with the immediate family before publication prevents an argument that cannot be corrected once the notice has appeared.

Practical constraints

Newspapers generally charge by length and have their own submission requirements and deadlines, which differ between publications and change.

Funeral home websites and online memorial pages usually carry no length limit, so many families publish a short paid notice and a fuller piece online.

Identifying details such as a full date of birth or a mother's maiden name are worth considering carefully, since notices are public and are used by people attempting identity fraud.

Writing it before it is needed

Some people draft their own, which spares a family the task and settles questions of emphasis and inclusion that survivors would otherwise have to guess at.

Even a page of notes about what someone would want mentioned makes the difference between a written obituary and an assembled one.