Writing Obituaries That Actually Sound Like a Person
Most funeral homes run obituaries through templates, and it shows. The family gets a generic wall of text that reads the same as every other one printed in the local paper. I spent years watching families get handed form letters and trying to figure out why the small operators somehow avoided that trap. The answer is usually simpler than people think. Small funeral homes tend to do better here because the people writing the obituaries actually know the family. They sat at the kitchen table with the daughter who couldn't stop crying long enough to pick five facts about her father's life. Big chain operations often assign this work to someone who was told to pull info from a social media page and a death certificate. The difference is measurable in the word count of actual human detail. Here's how it works in practice. When I'm helping a family draft an obituary, the first step is always asking for one specific memory that isn't on any resume or public record. Something small. The way he always put the car in reverse facing the house so they wouldn't have to back out in the dark. The fact that she collected ceramic frogs but never displayed them. These details don't fit in a standard bio box, and that's the point.
The structure I use is pretty straightforward. I start with the basic facts - name, age, date of death, immediate family. Then I move into a paragraph that answers one question: what did this person actually do with their days? Not their job title. Their habits, their quirks, the things they cared about enough to talk about repeatedly. Then I close with service details and a line about where to send flowers or make a donation, if the family wants that. I ran into a problem once with a veteran whose family wanted every medal and deployment listed. The obituary was going to read like a military record. We ended up cutting the decorations down to the Bronze Star and instead included a paragraph about how he taught his granddaughter to fish at the exact same spot where his own father had taught him. The funeral director told me afterward that three separate people came up to the family specifically to talk about the fishing story. That's the stuff people actually remember. There are some things to watch out for. Families often want to include every accomplishment, which turns the obituary into a CV. People also tend to sanitize things - leave out the second marriage, the estranged sibling, the year in jail. None of that is required, but a little honesty usually makes the piece more readable. Readers can tell when something is being filtered through too many layers of polish.
Another pitfall is the language itself. Words like "passed" instead of "died" or "departed this life" add nothing and make the writing feel distant. Just say he died. Say she passed away. The euphemisms don't soften the blow for anyone who's actually grieving, and they slow down the reading. People skim obituaries. A clear sentence is better than a carefully cushioned one. Length matters more than most people realize. A obituary under two hundred words usually means the writer didn't get enough from the family. Two to four hundred words is the sweet spot for most local papers. Over five hundred and you're paying extra for length without adding substance. The families I work with typically need about twenty to thirty minutes of actual conversation to generate enough material for a solid three-hundred-word piece. If it takes longer than that, I'm usually asking the wrong questions. One thing that doesn't get discussed enough is the timeline pressure. Families are often asked to submit the obituary within forty-eight hours of death. That's not enough time to dig out real memories. The workaround I use is to draft a skeleton version immediately with the bare facts, publish that to meet the deadline, then follow up with the family over the next week to add the details that make it feel human. Most papers will run an updated version or a follow-up notice at no extra charge.
Get the Full Details
The downside of the small funeral home approach is consistency. When obituary writing depends on individual staff members rather than a standardized process, the quality can vary wildly from one family to the next. Some directors are genuinely good at drawing out personal stories. Others are just as likely to hand you a template and rush you out the door. There's no reliable way to know which one you're getting until you've already paid for the service. If a family is struggling with this on their own, the best resource I've found is the local newspaper's obituary desk. They see hundreds of these and can spot the ones that feel empty within the first paragraph. They'll often suggest specific additions for free. It's not a perfect guide, but it's more useful than most of the generic worksheets funeral homes provide. The obituary is usually the first written thing people produce about someone after they die. It sets the tone for how the community remembers them. Getting it wrong isn't fatal, but it's noticeable. The small funeral homes that get this right aren't doing anything magical. They're just asking better questions and letting the answers stand without smoothing them into something generic.
