Writing Obituaries That Actually Mean Something
The hardest part about writing an obituary isn't the format. It's knowing what to leave out. You have hours of material from a family who wants every detail preserved, but the space in the paper or on the website is limited and people skim. Waterbury Funeral Home handles this regularly, and what I've noticed is that the best ones follow a quiet structure most families don't think about until it's too late. An obituary at a place like Waterbury works as a touchstone because it anchors grief to something concrete. A date. A list of survivors. A specific story instead of generic praise. When someone reads it years later, those details pull the memory back into focus. That's the whole point, really. The rest is logistics. Here's how the process actually works once you sit down with a family. You start by getting the factual skeleton out of the way first. Full legal name, date of birth, date of death, city of residence at the time. Cause of death is optional and many families choose not to include it. Waterbury typically asks upfront whether the family wants that included, and if they're unsure, you leave it out and come back to it later. Most do.
After the facts, you move to surviving family members. This is where things get messy. Divorced parents, step-siblings who were closer than biological siblings, estranged children who still legally count as survivors, partners who were never married. I spent three hours once with a daughter who couldn't decide whether to list her former husband of twenty-two years in the obituary or omit him entirely. She ended up including him with just his name and no relational qualifier, which felt like the only move that didn't burn a bridge. There's no universal rule here. You ask the family what they want, you write it down, and you don't editorialize. The biographical paragraph comes next. This is where most obituaries go wrong because they try to summarize a whole life in three sentences. "He was a kind man who loved his family and enjoyed fishing" tells the reader nothing specific. Instead, you anchor it in verifiable details. Where he worked and for how long. What he actually did on a Tuesday afternoon. The restaurant he took his wife to every anniversary. The volunteer shift he never missed for fourteen years. These are the items people remember because they can picture them. At Waterbury, the in memoriam section serves a specific function that people often misunderstand. It's not just a list of people who died before the subject. It's a way of showing where someone fit in a lineage. A full obituary there will typically list parents, sometimes grandparents, occasionally a spouse who predeceased. The reason this matters is that it gives context to the person's life without requiring you to write a biography. It says: this is where he came from, and this is who he carried with him.
I ran into a specific edge case last November that took me longer than it should have to resolve. A family wanted to include a charitable organization in the remembrance section, but the wording kept coming out awkward. They wrote something like "in lieu of flowers, donations to the Humane Society" but it sat inside the in memoriam block where it looked like the donation was someone who had died. The fix was straightforward but not obvious if you haven't seen it before. I moved the donation language to a separate line below the service details, outside the family listing entirely, and labeled it clearly as a remembrance preference rather than part of the genealogical record. That distinction between the in memoriam block and the service instructions is something most templates don't make clear, and it trips people up every time. The service information follows the biographical section. Time, date, location, officiant if there is one. If the service is private, you state that plainly rather than leaving it vague. "Private family service" is standard and acceptable. If there's a public visitation beforehand, you list that separately with its own time and address. Waterbury usually coordinates this part directly with the family to confirm everything before it goes to print or publication. One thing beginners miss is the difference between the death notice and the full obituary. A death notice is the short version you run in the newspaper for space. It's mostly facts and service details, maybe a sentence or two. A full obituary has room for the biographical paragraph and the personal details that make it last. Families often confuse the two and assume the shorter version is sufficient. It isn't, if they want something that survives beyond the day it's published. The full obituary is what people find when they search years later. The death notice is what gets people through the door on the day of the service.
Get the Full Details
There are real limitations to this process that no one wants to talk about. First, families sometimes bring materials that contradict each other. A photo file that's corrupted. A date that doesn't match the death certificate. An address for the service that no longer exists because the church closed two years ago. You have to verify everything against primary sources, and that means asking the family for documents they may have already boxed up or thrown away. Second, the emotional state of the family makes the interview process slower than it should be. Rushing it produces errors. Not rushing it means sitting in a room for forty-five minutes while someone recounts the same story three times. Both are real. There's no clean workaround other than patience and written confirmations. The other bottleneck is publication timing. Most local papers require obituaries two to three days before the service. Waterbury can prepare drafts faster, but once they send the file to the newspaper or online platform, the clock starts ticking. If the family requests a change after submission, you're often looking at a resubmission fee or a delay that pushes the publication past the service date. I've seen this happen twice in as many months, and both times the family was frustrated even though the error was theirs, not the funeral home's. The workaround is simple but easy to ignore: get final written approval from every surviving family member with decision-making authority before anything goes to print or web. A group text thread doesn't count. An email or a signed form does. If you're handling this yourself rather than working with a funeral home, the process is the same but the oversight is thinner. You need to verify dates against a death certificate, confirm the correct spelling of every name in the family listing, and decide on your own whether to include cause of death or leave it out. Online platforms like Legacy.com allow self-submission, but they don't offer the same review process. A mistake on those sites often requires a paid correction afterward. Working with a licensed home like Waterbury means someone else catches the errors before they become permanent.
The tone of the piece should match the family's wishes, not yours. Some want formal language. Some want humor. Some want religious references. Some want none of that at all. A good obituary reflects the deceased and the family, not the writer's sense of what sounds appropriate. If the subject was a grumpy retiree who joked about everything, a stiff formal tone feels wrong even if it's technically correct. Get that right and the piece holds up. Get it wrong and people stop reading halfway through. After publication, the obituary becomes a permanent record unless the family requests a takedown or correction. Most platforms keep them up indefinitely. This is useful and it's also a source of anxiety for families who worry about what their relative's online presence will look like ten years from now. There's no standard answer to that concern other than being transparent about how long the record will persist and which platform hosts it. Waterbury typically provides the family with copies of the final published versions for their records, which is something you should do regardless of where you publish.
