Writing Obituaries That Actually Work
The Enduring Legacy Of Lea Simmons Funeral Home Obituaries Honoring Lives With Dignity comes down to one thing most people get wrong on the first draft. It is not about using fancy words. It is about getting the basic facts right and letting the person's actual life show through without padding. I spent years helping families draft obituaries for Lea Simmons Funeral Home. The process is straightforward, but there are a few specific traps that keep showing up. I will walk through how we actually do it here, what goes into a solid draft, and where people routinely mess up.
The Enduring Legacy Of Lea Simmons Funeral Home Obituaries Honoring Lives With Dignity
Lea Simmons operates out of North Carolina, and their obituary standards are fairly typical for a solid regional home, but they have a habit of catching details that other places gloss over. The home tends to publish through the News & Record and local papers like the Fayetteville Observer. They also handle online memorial pages now, which changes the format slightly. The core structure is simple enough. Full legal name, age at death, city of residence, date and place of death, surviving family members, predeceased relatives, service details, and a brief biographical paragraph. That is the skeleton. The living part is where the work happens. Here is how I approach a draft from scratch. First, I pull the death certificate information. The name on the certificate has to match exactly what goes in the obit. If someone goes by a nickname but their certificate says something else, I clarify with the family before publishing. The funeral home will not run an obit with mismatched names, and newspapers will reject it too.
Next, I list the survivors in the standard order: spouse first, then children, grandchildren, parents if applicable, siblings. I usually ask the family for a handwritten note about the deceased, something two or three sentences long. That becomes the biographical paragraph. It reads more human than anything I could invent from an interview. For Lea Simmons specifically, they prefer that you submit obituaries directly to their office before placing them in newspapers. This gives their staff a chance to catch errors. I always send the draft to the home first, then wait for their formatting notes. The turnaround is usually same day, sometimes next morning if it is late afternoon. The cost factor matters too. Most newspapers charge by the line or by the inch. A standard obit at the News & Record runs around $200 to $350 depending on length. Lea Simmons themselves do not charge for drafting the obit, but they do have a list of preferred printers and layout partners. Using their recommended vendors can shave about 30 percent off the final bill because the file formats are pre-optimized.
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One specific problem I ran into involves veteran deaths. A family once submitted an obit that listed the deceased as a World War II veteran, but the draft did not include the exact discharge dates or branch specifics that newspapers require for military notation. Without those details, the paper runs the obit without the veteran designation, which families find deeply disappointing. The workaround is simple. Ask for a copy of the DD-214 before writing. Fill in the branch, rank, dates of service, and any medals. I keep a template for this now and paste the military section directly into the draft. Takes ten seconds and prevents the whole issue. Another edge case is blended families. People forget to mention stepchildren or list them in the wrong order. I always ask families to explicitly confirm who counts as a survivor versus who is predeceased. Getting that wrong creates tension at the reading that does not need to exist. A single clarifying question during the intake call resolves it before it becomes a problem. The biographical paragraph is where most drafts fail. People write generic summaries. "She was a kind woman who loved her family." That tells the reader nothing. I push families toward specific details. What did the person actually do all day? Were they a shop teacher for thirty years? Did they restore classic cars on weekends? Did they volunteer at the animal shelter every Tuesday? Those specifics are what make an obit readable. The rest is just administrative data.
Language choices matter more than people realize. I avoid words like "passed away" when "died" works fine. Newspapers actually prefer plain language. "Died" is not cruel. It is clear. Euphemisms just slow down the reader. I also avoid religious language unless the family specifically requests it. Lea Simmons handles services for various denominations, so the obit itself stays neutral unless instructed otherwise. The service announcement can include religious details if needed. Photos are another thing families struggle with. The funeral home accepts digital submissions, but they need to be at least 300 DPI and under 5 MB. Most people send phone photos that are way too small or compressed. I tell families to take a photo of a good print with a camera phone in bright natural light. It beats sending a blurry JPEG every time. Lea Simmons will crop and resize on their end, but the source file has to be decent quality or the print comes out grainy in the newspaper. Timing is relatively fixed. If someone dies on a Monday, the obit typically runs in Wednesday or Thursday editions. That means you have roughly 48 hours to get the draft finalized. I find it helps to lock down the bio paragraph within the first six hours. Once that is done, the rest fills in quickly. The hardest part is always getting the family to agree on a single version. Multiple cousins will want changes. I set a hard deadline of two hours after initial submission for revisions. Anything after that goes into the next publication cycle.
There are real limitations to this whole process. Online memorial pages from funeral homes are becoming more common, but they do not carry the same weight as a printed obit. Some families treat the online version as the primary notice and the print version as secondary. That is a mistake. The print obit reaches people who are not active on social media or memorial websites. Elderly relatives, coworkers, and distant acquaintances often only see the newspaper version. I always recommend doing both, and treating the print version as the authoritative record. Another bottleneck is the intake call itself. Families are often overwhelmed and may not remember basic facts under stress. I ask for the full legal name, date of birth, date of death, city of residence, and the names of immediate survivors upfront. Everything else can be filled in later. Rushing through the intake without capturing the essentials leads to phone tag for days. I have lost a whole publication window because someone forgot to confirm the city of residence until the day before the deadline. That is avoidable if you front-load the critical fields. For anyone working with Lea Simmons or similar homes, the practical takeaway is that preparation beats perfection. A slightly shorter obit with accurate details and a strong biographical paragraph will always outperform a long padded one. The home's staff knows this. They will edit ruthlessly if you give them room. Let them trim the fat. Your goal is clarity, not volume.
The process itself usually takes between 90 minutes and two hours for a first draft, depending on how much information the family provides. Revisions run another 20 to 40 minutes. Total time from death to published obit is typically 36 to 60 hours if everything goes smoothly. Delays happen when families wait too long to confirm details or when the death occurs on a weekend and the newspaper deadline has already passed. Plan around those constraints and the whole thing moves quietly. I have written hundreds of these over the years. The ones that stick are the simple ones. The ones that get lost are the ones trying too hard to be something they are not. Dignity in an obit is just honesty with a little care. That is all it really takes.
