Writing Obituaries That Actually Matter
Most obituary writers treat it as a chore. Fill in the blank template, list the surviving family, drop the service time, and move on to the next one. The results are fine. They also forgettable. I learned a different way working with the local paper, and it changed how I approach every piece that runs in the paper. The Salt Lake Tribune has published obituaries for over a century. The older archives, especially the handwritten ones before the 1980s, are a goldmine. You can trace neighborhood shifts, see which churches dominated family networks, and watch entire industries come and go through the occupations listed. It is less glamorous than it sounds. A lot of the entries are just name, date, and "survived by..." but the exceptions reveal everything. My first real lesson came from a mistake. I was compiling a feature on a deceased teacher and pulled a standard death notice from the Tribune archive. It listed her as a "retired educator." Generic. Meaningless. I spent two days digging through city records, old PTA newsletters, and a box of yearbooks at the county historical society before I found the full story. She had been the advisor for the debate team at a high school for thirty-two years. That single detail changed the entire angle of the piece. The moral was simple. Don't trust the death notice. The death notice is a skeleton. You have to add the flesh yourself.
Here is the practical workflow I use now, and it usually takes me about three to four hours per obituary instead of the thirty minutes most writers spend on them.
The Process
Start with the official record. Pull the death certificate if you have access, or at minimum the newspaper's own death notice. This gives you the baseline facts: full legal name, dates, place of death, immediate survivors. Most people stop here. Do not stop here. Next, search the Tribune archive itself. Go back at least ten years on the deceased. Search their name as a string. You will find earlier articles mentioning them. A wedding announcement. A business opening. A volunteer award. These hits are the difference between a paragraph and a profile. After that, go outside the paper. Call the funeral home. The staff there talks to families every day and they often remember details that never make it into the written statement. A hobby. A quirky habit. The fact that someone made it through college at age sixty-two. I once got the entire shape of a man's obituary from a funeral director who said, "He kept asking about the parking lot. Something about it bothered him." That became the opening line.
Get the Full Details
Common Pitfalls
The biggest error I see is the chronological recital. Born here. Married here. Worked here. Died here. It reads like a resume padded with dates. Nobody reads that far. I always try to lead with a human moment instead. A specific event. A contradiction. Something that makes the reader want to know more. Another trap is over-reliance on the family-provided information. Families often submit their own drafts with the funeral home. These are frequently sanitized. They omit struggles, second marriages, career changes, or anything that might make the deceased look complicated. Complex people are more interesting. Include the complications unless there is a legal reason not to. A third issue is the assumption that everyone wants a religious tone. Some families do. Some want humor. A few want nothing at all. I ask directly. Not "would you like a religious obituary?" but "what would you want someone to remember about this person?" The answer is almost never the same as the template.
What Works
The obituaries that stick are the ones that feel like they were written by someone who actually knew the person. Specificity does the work. Instead of "she was kind," write "she kept a stock of emergency candy in her desk drawer for students who skipped lunch." Instead of "he was dedicated to his work," write "he answered emails at 11 PM because he couldn't sleep anyway." Details like that take seconds to research but years to fabricate convincingly, and readers can tell the difference. I also recommend ending with something forward-looking rather than a standard farewell. A community member who volunteers at the food bank every Saturday. A scholarship established in someone's name. A local trail renamed. These give the piece a sense of ongoing impact that feels honest.
The Downside
This approach has limitations. It requires time that not every publication can afford. Some newspapers run obituaries on a tight turnover and cannot support multi-day research. In those cases, the formulaic version is acceptable. It serves a function. It tells people when and where to go and who to contact. But if you have the hours to dig, the extra effort is worth it. The result is something people actually save or frame, rather than discard after reading once. Also, not every deceased person has an archival trail. People who moved frequently, changed names, or lived quietly leave fewer paper records. In those cases, relying on living family members and close friends becomes essential, and their memories are naturally selective. You have to parse bias without dismissing the source entirely. It is a balance.
Resources
The Salt Lake Tribune archive is accessible through the university library system and various genealogy websites. The Utah State Archives holds death records going back well over a century. Local historical societies often have oral history collections that can fill gaps. Nothing replaces calling people who knew the deceased in person. Obituaries are supposed to do more than announce a death. They are supposed to preserve a life in a way that outlasts the funeral. The ones that achieve that require work. A lot of it. But the alternative is just noise in the paper, and nobody needs more of that.
