Writing Obituaries That Actually Mean Something
I've spent years helping families put together obituaries for Tezak Funeral Home, and the thing most people get wrong is thinking an obituary is just a death notice with biographical data. It isn't. It's the final statement a family controls about someone, and the difference between a forgettable listing and something people actually read comes down to a few practical choices most funeral directors won't bother explaining. The process starts with information gathering, and this is where the real work happens. You need the basics - full legal name, date of birth, date of death, surviving family members, predeceased relatives, service details. But you also need the stuff that makes it a biography rather than a spreadsheet. What did this person actually do with their time? Were they the kind of person who fixed everyone's cars on weekends? Who volunteered at the same church food pantry for thirty years? Who taught fourth grade and retired only because their doctor told them to? At Tezak, the staff understands this distinction. They've been doing this since 1964, which means they've seen every variation of grief and every type of family dynamic you can imagine. Their obituary process is structured but flexible enough to handle the edge cases that make or break a good write-up.
The Legacy Of Tezak Funeral Home Obituaries A Tradition Of Honor And Respect
Here's something nobody tells you about writing obituaries for this particular home: the standard template they work from is actually quite restrictive. It follows a traditional format that some families find limiting. The workaround I use is to draft the obituary separately from the submission form. I write the full narrative version first, then strip it down to fit their required fields. This usually takes about 45 minutes of drafting for a standard obituary, versus 10 minutes if you're just filling boxes. The extra time shows up in the final product. One specific problem I ran into recently involved a family where the deceased had two sets of children from different marriages, and the surviving family structure was complicated by estrangement. The standard template forces you to list survivors in a single block. If you list everyone, you risk highlighting the very family tensions the deceased spent their last years trying to avoid. If you omit anyone, you invite those same tensions to surface publicly. My solution was to list the deceased's children first, then add a separate line for "beloved grandchildren" without naming the parents. It satisfied the template requirements while giving the family exactly the coverage they wanted without exposing the friction points. The funeral director understood immediately and didn't push back. Another counter-intuitive thing about obituary writing: less detail is often more effective. I've seen families include seven paragraphs about a person's career achievements, and then three sentences about who they actually were as a human being. The obituary becomes a resume, and resumes are boring. A 300-word piece that captures a person's actual character through one or two specific anecdotes will resonate far more than a 600-word chronology. The key is specificity. "He loved fishing" tells you nothing. "He spent every Saturday morning from 1987 to 2019 at the same bait shop in Layton, and the owners saved him a cup of coffee on the counter" tells you everything.
The timing matters too. Obituaries published within 48 hours of death tend to have lower readership because people are still navigating the initial shock. Waiting until the third day - when most families have arranged the service and know the details - usually results in better engagement. That said, publishing too late means people forget. The sweet spot is typically day two or three after death, coordinated with the funeral service date. There are genuine limitations to this approach that the industry doesn't discuss openly. The traditional obituary format favors certain demographics. Elderly white Americans with long careers and large extended families produce obituaries that read naturally within the established format. People who were incarcerated, homeless, or otherwise outside conventional social structures, or who died young without the expected life milestones, often produce obituaries that feel incomplete when forced into this template. In those cases, the format itself becomes part of the story, and sometimes the best approach is to acknowledge that gap rather than fill it with generic language. Cost is another factor. Standard obituaries in local papers through Tezak's recommended run between $150 and $400 depending on length and publication. Online-only obituaries through the funeral home's website are typically included in basic packages. If a family is on a tight budget, the online-only option with a well-written narrative serves most purposes, especially since most people search for obituaries online now rather than in print.
Get the Full Details
The bottom line is that a good obituary isn't about following a formula. It's about knowing what details matter and having the discipline to leave out the ones that don't. Tezak has built their reputation on treating this process with the seriousness it deserves, and the families who take the time to work with them on the details tend to be the ones whose obituaries people actually remember reading.
