Reading Obituaries Is Exhausting Work
You spend years doing this and you still get hit by one. Rivera Funeral Home runs one of the larger obituary sections in the area, and if you read enough of them you start noticing patterns. The good ones are brief. The bad ones run three pages and read like a novel someone wrote in a hurry. I started tracking which funerals had which style back when I was coordinating memorial services for a small organization, and after about eight months I basically stopped reading past the first paragraph of most of them. It protects your head. The title is almost exactly what the content delivers. Rivera Funeral Home publishes obituaries that range from the painfully clinical to the deeply personal, and the gap between those two poles is where the emotional whiplash lives. A typical straightforward listing might read: "John Michael Smith, 72, of Greenville, passed away peacefully surrounded by family. A graveside service will be held at 2pm Thursday at Oakwood Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the American Cancer Society." Nothing wrong with that. It is clean. It is respectful. It moves on. Then you see the next one. It is seventeen paragraphs long. It mentions his third grade teacher, the exact brand of coffee he drank every morning for forty years, the way his wife used to steal his hoodie and hide it in her closet, and how their golden retriever waited by the door every day until he came home. It names seven siblings, three stepchildren, twelve grandchildren, and the woman who ran the diner where he worked his first job at nineteen. You finish reading and you have to put the paper down or close the tab and stand up and walk around the room for a few minutes before you can function again.
Why Some Obituaries Hit Harder Than Others
Most people don't realize that the length and detail of an obituary is usually determined by three things: who is writing it, how much the family wants to process publicly, and whether the death was expected or sudden. When someone dies unexpectedly, the family tends to fill more space. They need to say everything before anyone else says anything for them. That is normal. It is also emotionally expensive for the reader. When someone dies after a long illness, especially one that has been mentioned in the community before, the obituary is often shorter. People already know the story. The family doesn't need to re-explain it. The emotional weight there is different. It is heavier in a quieter way. It sits in the details that are left out rather than the ones that are included. I learned this the hard way in 2019. I was helping a friend coordinate her father's arrangements through Rivera, and she wanted a detailed obituary. Standard request. I wrote the draft, sent it to her, and she read it back and said "this makes him sound like a stranger." That threw me. I had included every achievement, every job title, every organization he served on, and it came across as a resume. She then gave me the real version. She told me about the time he stayed up all night fixing a neighbor's bike chain in the rain, about how he always bought two coffees even when he was alone, about the way he hummed off-key in the kitchen. I rewrote it with those details and it was half the length and ten times stronger. The lesson was straightforward. Specific human behaviors matter more than credentials every single time.
Common Pitfalls People Make When Writing Obituaries
The biggest mistake I see repeated at Rivera and every other funeral home is listing accomplishments instead of describing a person. Title-dropping is not a tribute. "He served as president of the rotary club from 2008 to 2012" reads very differently from "He showed up to every meeting even when he was sick because he said a promise was a promise." One tells you what he did. The other tells you who he was. Another mistake is burying the most important information at the end. Families often put service details first because that is practical. But the part people actually remember is the opening paragraph. If you open with "he loved fishing and missed his girls," that is what stays with someone. If you open with a date of birth and a list of survivors, the emotional hook comes too late. The third mistake is omitting the cause of death when it matters to the reader. This one is tricky. Some families want privacy. Some want transparency. If someone died from an opioid overdose, for example, naming it can save lives. It signals to readers that this was a real possibility. Hiding it completely removes that warning. I have had conversations with families about this exact thing, and the ones who choose to name it usually do so with a sentence like "He struggled with addiction for ten years and lost his battle this week." That is honest. It does not glorify anything. It just states the fact.
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What to Expect Emotionally When Reading These
If you read obituaries regularly, especially at a place like Rivera where they publish consistently, you will develop a sort of callus. It is not that you stop caring. It is that you learn to pace yourself. I usually limit myself to ten or twelve per session. Beyond that, the grief starts bleeding together and you lose the ability to separate individual stories from the general weight of death. That is when you stop being present and start just scanning. Sometimes you will find someone you knew. Maybe you went to school with the person. Maybe their spouse used to work at the same company as you. Rivera covers a wide geographic area, so the chances of overlap are higher than they would be with a smaller publication. When that happens, it feels weird. You flip back through the details trying to figure out if you actually knew them or if you just knew of them. You remember a face and then you don't remember anything else. That uncertainty is uncomfortable. There is also the pattern recognition that kicks in after a while. Certain phrases appear repeatedly. "Passed peacefully" usually means hospice or old age. "Surrounded by family" often means the death was expected and multiple relatives were present. "At peace" can mean the same thing or it can be boilerplate. You learn to read between the lines a little bit. It is not macabre. It is just efficiency. You are trying to understand what happened quickly so you can move on to the next one.
A Practical Approach to Handling the Content
If you are a family member writing an obituary for submission to Rivera Funeral Home, here is what I would suggest based on what actually works. Start with one paragraph that captures the essence of the person. Not their resume. Their essence. Then add a second paragraph with the practical details: when, where, service information, donations. Then add a third paragraph with three or four specific memories that illustrate the person. Not generic ones. The kind that only you would think of. The kind that make someone reading it say "I remember that too." Keep it under five hundred words unless there is a strong reason to go longer. Longer obituaries do not communicate more love. They communicate more information. Those are not the same thing. Most people skim past the middle section of a long obituary anyway. They read the opening and the closing. Put the meat where they will see it. If you are reading these obituaries rather than writing them, set a time limit. Fifteen minutes. Thirty at most. Close the tab when the timer goes off. You will absorb more than you think in that window. After that you are just accumulating sorrow without processing it. That does not help the people who died. It does not help the families. It just hurts you.
The obituaries at Rivera Funeral Home are not just announcements. They are compressed biographies. Some of them are well written. Some of them are messy. A few of them are so blunt you wonder if the family handed the writer a list of dates and hoped for the best. All of them are records. Eventually you become someone's relative and your own name will appear in one of them. The ones you read now are practice for that day. They teach you what language sounds like when it is used to describe a human life. Pay attention to which ones land and which ones fall flat. You will use that knowledge later.
