Writing obituaries that don't read like templates
Most obituaries are written by people who have never done it before and are reading instructions off their phone while sitting in a funeral home waiting room. The pressure is real but the format is actually straightforward once you get past the initial hurdle of not knowing where to start. The first step is gathering facts. Not the polished Wikipedia version of a person's life, but the raw material. Dates, places, relationships, employment history. I learned early on that you need to interview at least three different people connected to the deceased, because each person remembers completely different details. The sister might mention the volunteer work at the food bank while the college roommate has no idea that existed. You compile everything into a single document before you write a single sentence of the actual obituary. After facts come the structure. I typically use this order: full legal name and age, city of residence, date of passing, key biographical highlights (education, career milestones, military service if applicable), immediate family members (both surviving and predeceased), hobbies or passions, and funeral or memorial service details. That's it. Nothing fancy. Nothing that requires a thesaurus thesize of a telephone book.
One thing beginners constantly get wrong is the tone. A obituary is not a eulogy. It's a factual notice published in a newspaper or online, often with a character limit that your editor will enforce without mercy. Keep it respectful but lean toward the concise side. People skim obituaries. They're looking for the service information, not a novel. I ran into a specific problem once that I still think about. A family had written their own obituary for their father and they'd included his entire military decoration list — seventeen medals, each one with the formal name and year awarded. The newspaper editor cut it down to the top three and the family was upset. What I did was help them draft a separate "military honors" section they could include as a flyer handed out at the service instead. That satisfied everyone without bending the newspaper's style guide. The hardest part is usually the survivor list. Families fight over what to include. Do you list every living grandchild by name? Most newspapers don't require it. A simple "survived by his wife of forty-two years, three children, and seven grandchildren" covers the requirement without turning the obituary into a genealogy spreadsheet. The exception is when the family specifically wants names published, and that's fine too. Just be prepared to send it through once and then accept that it's final.
What most people miss when writing an obituary
The counter-intuitive part of obituary writing is that the best ones aren't the longest. A twenty-line obituary that captures the actual person tends to resonate more than a full page of generic praise. Include one specific detail that makes the person recognizable — the way he always parked three doors down from his neighbors so he could chat with them, the fact that she kept a recipe box handwritten in blue ink that she'd been adding to since 1974, that kind of thing. It costs nothing to add and it prevents the piece from reading like five obituaries pasted together. Another thing nobody warns you about is the proofreading step. I've seen at least four published obituaries with the wrong date of death, a misspelled surname, or a living person listed as predeceased. Print the draft on paper, read it aloud, and then read it backward from the last line to the first. That disrupts the flow enough to catch errors your brain would otherwise auto-correct. It takes about eight minutes and saves you from having to issue a correction notice later. There are also limitations you need to know. If the deceased died under circumstances that the coroner or medical examiner is still investigating, the obituary should not include any speculation about the cause of death. Stick to the confirmed facts. Some families want to mention "died peacefully" or "died after a long illness" and that's fine when accurate, but it's not something you should add just to soften the language. Newspapers can and will reject obituaries that contain unverifiable claims.
Get the Full Details
Cost is another factor. Major metropolitan newspapers charge by the line or by the inch. A standard obituary with a photograph runs anywhere from eighty to two hundred fifty dollars depending on the market and whether it's placed in the print edition or online only. Smaller local papers are often cheaper or sometimes free. Call ahead and ask about current rates, character limits, and whether they require a death certificate or funeral home contact information before accepting the piece. Doing that call takes five minutes and prevents a two-day delay later. If you're helping a family write an obituary, the most useful thing you can do is take the initial drafting off their plate. They don't need to figure out the format or wrestle with the wording. They need to review and approve. Send them a clean draft with clear questions about anything you're unsure of — spelling of names, correct military branch, surviving siblings' names — and give them forty-eight hours to respond. That timeline works for almost every family without creating unnecessary stress. When you're Done, submit the obituary to the funeral home first if they're handling arrangements. They usually have established relationships with the newspapers and can verify that the service details match. A mismatch between what the obituary says and what the church bulletin says creates confusion and late phone calls that nobody needs.
