Writing Obituaries When Everything Is Online
I used to think obituary writing was simple. You get the facts, you list the survivors, you hit publish. That was before I started helping people through this stuff during the pandemic, when everyone needed to do it remotely and no one knew how. The modern obituary process has become this hybrid thing between traditional journalism and digital memorial curation. You are writing a biography for people who may never meet the deceased, while simultaneously creating a searchable record that will sit on the internet forever. Both tasks matter, but they require different skills.
Quinn Mcgowen Obituaries Remembering A Life And Navigating Grief In The Digital Age
Here is how I actually approach it now, after doing dozens of these. Start with the raw timeline. Before you write a single sentence of the obituary, get the family on a call and map out the major life events in order. Birth, education, career, marriages, children, hobbies, the end. Most people skip this step because they want to get to writing, but without the timeline, you will miss important connections and end up with a disjointed piece that reads like a resume instead of a life story. Next, collect the sensory details. This is where most people fail. They ask what the person did, not what the person was like. I keep a small list of questions I send ahead of time: What did their coffee cup look like? What song came on when they walked into a room? What object did they never travel without? These details take up maybe three sentences in the final piece, but they transform it from a list of accomplishments into something people actually want to read.
I encountered a specific problem last year that changed how I work. A family wanted to include a QR code linking to a video tribute in the online obituary. The funeral home had no system for embedding or tracking QR codes, and the link they gave me was a generic YouTube URL, not a custom short link. When the video got unlisted two months later by the uploader, the obituary had a dead link. Nothing I could do about it at that point. The workaround I use now is straightforward. I create a dedicated cloud folder for each obituary project. All media gets uploaded there immediately. I generate a custom Bitly link for video content and log it in a shared spreadsheet with the expiration date and password. If the family wants a QR code, I generate it myself using a stable URL. This usually adds about ten minutes to the process but prevents the kind of embarrassment where readers click through to nothing.
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The Digital Layer Changes Everything
Traditional obituaries ran in newspapers for one edition. Digital obituaries live forever, which means you have to think about searchability and permanence differently. I treat the digital version as a separate document from the print version, even when they share the same core content. For the digital version, I add a metadata section at the top that is not visible to readers but helps search engines and family members find the page later. This includes the full legal name, any maiden names, the city of death, the date of death, and the name of the funeral home. Family members search for their relatives using different name variations. Having this information upfront reduces the number of follow-up calls I get asking why the page is not showing up in Google. The counter-intuitive part that beginners miss is that shorter digital obituaries often perform better. A 400-word piece with strong details will get shared and read more than a 1200-word version that buries the personality under excessive biographical data. I cut down average length from about 900 words to 550 over the past few years, and engagement metrics went up significantly on the platforms I track.
Common Pitfalls I See Repeatedly
The biggest mistake is writing the obituary before confirming the exact service details with the funeral home. I once published a piece listing a visitation time that was wrong because the family had changed the schedule the day before and did not tell me. It took three hours to correct the error across three different publisher sites. Always confirm the times, location, and any livestream links directly with the funeral director before you finalize anything. Another issue is the photo problem. Most publishers allow one or two images. Families will send six. I pick the photos that show the person in a recognizable, approachable way. Group photos at family gatherings rarely work well because readers cannot identify the deceased. A single clear headshot or a photo of the person doing something typical is worth more than three technically superior but emotionally distant images. There is also the question of privacy that nobody discusses enough. When you publish an obituary online, you are creating a permanent record that includes the date and location of death, names of survivors, and biographical details. Some families do not consider that this information will be indexed by genealogy websites and data brokers. I usually mention this briefly to families who are posting for the first time, not as a warning, just as factual information. If they want to limit exposure, they can choose a platform that allows editing or set the page to private after a certain period.
What Actually Helps During the Process
Use a template, but do not let the template write the piece. I keep a standard structure in my documents that includes the opening paragraph with name and date of death, the biographical section, the survivor list, and the service information. This saves me maybe twenty minutes per obituary compared to starting from scratch. But the opening paragraph and the sensory details always need to be written fresh for each person. The survivor section is where I see the most variation in approach. Some families want every living relative listed by relationship. Others prefer a shorter list of immediate family only. I ask before I write. Getting this wrong means rewriting the entire section, and people are already stressed enough during this time. If you are dealing with a complicated family situation, such as estranged relatives or children from multiple marriages, I recommend discussing the survivor list with the primary contact person before drafting. The obituary is not the place to work through family dynamics. It is a factual record, and ambiguity in that section causes more problems than clarity would.
A Note on the Grief Aspect
I do not have training in grief counseling, and I do not pretend to understand what anyone else is going through. What I have observed is that the process of writing an obituary forces a person to engage with the reality of the loss in a concrete way. Some people find that helpful. Others find it painful and prefer to delegate the task entirely. Neither response is wrong. The quality of the final piece does not depend on the emotional state of the person providing the information, and it does not reflect on how much someone loved the deceased. It reflects on how much clarity they could bring to the factual details under difficult circumstances. If you are working through this yourself, take your time with the timeline. Get the sensory details. Confirm the logistics. Pick one good photo. Keep it around five hundred words. These are the things that actually matter for the final product.
