Remembering A Dedicated Public Servant The Obituary Of Ernest J Nardolillo

Writing Obituaries for People Who Actually mattered

I spent years helping families put together obituaries, and the ones that stick with you aren't the polished press-release versions you see in big newspapers. They're the ones that sound like a real person wrote them about a real person who did real work. Ernest J. Nardolillo is exactly the kind of case I'm talking about. When someone's life is wrapped up in public service, there's a specific pressure to get it right, and most people doing it for the first time don't know where to start. The core problem with public service obituaries is that everyone wants to list every title, every committee, every award. What you end up with is a resume dressed up as grief. I learned this the hard way back in 2018 when a city clerk asked me to draft one for a deputy who had literally been on every zoning board in the county for twenty-three years. We had forty bullet points. Nobody read past the third one. The family was miserable about it. What we ended up doing was stripping it down to three concrete stories that showed what he actually did, then tucking the rest into a separate document for the funeral program. That version got a handwritten note from a constituent two weeks later saying she finally understood what her property was worth because of his work. That's the difference between a list and a life. Here's the practical approach that actually works. Start by gathering what I call the texture details. These are the things that only someone who worked alongside the person would know. Did the public servant show up early every single Tuesday to help at the community food drive regardless of what was on their official schedule? Did they remember the names of voters' dogs? The specific habit of signing petition sheets with that one particular pen they always carried? These details do more work than any tenure date ever will. They make the person visible. A reader should finish the obituary and feel like they just met someone, not like they're reading a government annual report.

The structure I use is deceptively simple. Open with the facts of passing — name, age, location, date. Then immediately pivot to the character. One paragraph on the public service record, but written like narrative rather than a chronology. One paragraph on the personal life that existed outside the job. One paragraph on who survives them. Then close with service details and a specific call to action for donations or gestures in their name. I always recommend directing tributes toward the actual organization the person cared about most, not a generic memorial fund. It means something more when it goes somewhere real. One thing most people miss is the importance of the tone calibration between institutional respect and personal warmth. A public servant obituary lives in two venues simultaneously. It appears in official records, newspaper archives, and government websites, but it's also read by neighbors, coworkers, and the people whose lives the person touched directly. The language needs to satisfy both audiences without tilting too far toward either. Avoid bureaucratic phrasing like "dedicated herself to the betterment of the municipality." That's empty. Use "she spent twelve years fighting to keep the county library open on weekends so working parents wouldn't have to choose between their jobs and their kids' books." One version informs. The other version lands. There's a technical pitfall I see constantly. Including the full list of surviving family members in the main body of the obituary. This balloons the piece and dilutes every other detail. Put the survivor list in a separate section near the end, or better yet, move it to the funeral program entirely. The obituary itself should stay focused on the story. I've seen pieces run over eight hundred words because someone wanted to make sure every nephew and in-law was mentioned in paragraph form. It doesn't read that way to anyone. A tight four-hundred-word piece gets read. A bloated one gets scrolled past.

Another counter-intuitive tip: don't be afraid to acknowledge flaws or struggles if they're relevant. A public servant who overcame a specific obstacle to get into the work, or who admitted publicly to a mistake and spent years making it right, that's more human and more memorable than a perfect record. I once wrote an obituary for a transit authority director who'd been openly honest about a budget mismanagement scandal early in his career and then rebuilt the system from scratch. Including that made the piece feel honest instead of hagiographic. Readers trusted it. If you're working on this now and need a starting template, here's what I actually hand out. Name and age at the top. One opening sentence that captures the essence in plain language. Two or three paragraphs blending professional achievements with personal texture. A brief survivor listing. Service information. Donation details. That's it. Anything beyond that is usually padding. The Ernest J. Nardolillo obituary followed this exact structure and it worked because every sentence earned its place on the page. The hardest part is usually getting the family to let go of the impulse to include everything. They've spent months thinking about what to mention and they're terrified of leaving someone out. I understand that. But an obituary isn't an archive. It's a portrait. A portrait shows the face, not the fingerprint catalog. Tell the story that makes someone remember why this person mattered. Everything else can wait for the funeral program or the family archive where it belongs.