Writing Obituaries That Actually Sound Like Someone
I have spent more years than I care to count helping families put together obituaries at Loudon Funeral Home, and the single most common problem I see is that people treat the obituary like a resume. They list achievements. They don't capture character. The result is something that reads fine but could apply to any dead person. Obituaries work best when they reveal how someone actually lived. Not what they achieved on paper, but the small repeated behaviors that made them recognizable to the people who knew them. The loud laugh at church dinners. The way they always remembered your birthday even if you didn't text first. The particular habit of complaining about the weather every single morning for forty years and never once acknowledging the forecast had changed.
The Legacy They Leave Behind How Loudon Funeral Home Obituaries Serve As A Testament To Character
This is the question families bring to me constantly. They want the obituary to mean something beyond the standard template. They want people reading it thirty years from now to still understand who that person was. The answer isn't found in the professional accomplishments or the list of survivors, though those matter too. It's found in the specific, slightly odd, deeply human details that anyone who actually knew the person would recognize immediately. Here is how the process works when it goes well. You start by gathering raw material. This usually means calling or meeting with three or four people who knew the deceased in different contexts. One from family. One from work or volunteer life. One from hobbies or social circles. One from the earlier period of their life that might be forgotten. Each person will give you different material, and some of it will contradict itself. That's normal. It's also useful.
The standard format runs about 200 to 400 words. It includes the basic facts: full name, age, date and place of death, surviving family members, predeceased relatives, service information, and a donation or merchandise request if the family wants one. Everything outside that skeleton is where the character lives. I usually ask each source the same two questions. What is something this person did repeatedly that other people also did, but they did it differently? And what is something people used to joke about them for that was actually true and kind? The first question gives you behavior patterns. The second gives you affection. Both are necessary.
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Specific Details Over General Praise
There is a difference between writing that someone was "kind" and writing that they kept a jar of peppermints on the kitchen table for anyone who came through the door, including strangers who knocked at unusual hours. The first is an adjective. The second is evidence. Readers understand evidence. Adjectives are just claims. When I worked with a family last year for a man named Harold, his wife mentioned he fixed things. That's generic. After pressing for a minute, she said he fixed the neighbor's garbage disposal at midnight because the neighbor's husband was on a late shift and they couldn't afford an electrician until morning. That's a story. That's the obituary line. Another family I worked with included a detail about how the deceased always drove exactly five miles under the speed limit, never more, never less. That detail appeared in three separate conversations with different people. When something repeats across sources, it's usually worth including. It means it's a genuine pattern, not a single memory dressed up as a defining trait.
The hard part is filtering. You will get ten stories from one source and one from another. You cannot fit them all. The rule I follow is simple: include the detail that would surprise someone who only knew the person in one context. If the deceased was known at work as serious and by family as terrible at cooking, the obituary should probably mention the cooking. The serious work persona is already assumed. The contradiction is what makes the picture whole.
Common Pitfalls
There are several mistakes that happen repeatedly. The biggest is writing in third person like a formal announcement instead of like a human being describing another human being. Phrases like "departed this life" or "went to be with the Lord" work in some contexts but sound stiff in others. Match the tone to the person. If they were irreverent, the obituary can be irreverent. If they were formal, keep it formal. The worst mistake is writing something the person would have found awkward. Another frequent error is burying the most interesting detail in a list. If someone traveled to forty-seven countries and collected salt from every beach they visited, that belongs in the first paragraph, not hidden after three sentences about surviving children. Financial information has no place in obituaries. I once received a draft that included the deceased's retirement account balance "to show how disciplined they were." It did not show discipline. It showed a lack of boundaries. Discard everything that is not about the person's life and character.
Survivor lists are necessary but dry. The standard format requires them. What families often miss is that the order matters. Putting a spouse first is standard. But if the deceased was particularly close to a sibling who outlived them, or a grandchild they raised, the narrative before the survivor list can signal that relationship. The list itself stays conventional. The prose around it does the emotional work.
Edge Cases and Workarounds
Sometimes the material is thin. I dealt with a case where the deceased had no close friends outside their immediate family, no hobbies, no volunteer work, and a strained relationship with most of their extended family. The surviving children were polite but vague. "He was a good man," they said, which is technically true and entirely useless for an obituary. The workaround was to look at what he did with his time. He worked the same job for thirty-two years. He maintained his property. He paid his bills. He never missed a Sunday dinner. The repetition itself is the character. The obituary reads about consistency, reliability, and quiet commitment. Those are virtues, even when they produce no dramatic stories. Another edge case involves controversy. A family once wanted me to omit the fact that the deceased had been estranged from a child for fifteen years. The published obituary listed only the reconciled relationships. That is acceptable. Obituaries are curated, not exhaustive. You choose what serves the person's memory. But when you omit something significant, you should be aware of what you are leaving out, because readers will notice the silence.
Language barriers present their own difficulties. I have translated obituaries between English and Spanish, and the technical challenge is preserving specificity. Spanish obituary conventions sometimes favor longer kinship lists and more formal religious language. English ones tend toward shorter bios and more personal detail. When families request both, I usually write two separate versions rather than trying to merge them. Each tradition has its own rhythm.
What to Include Beyond the Basics
After the essential information, the remaining space should carry the personality. This is where the specific habits go. The profession, hobby, or cause that took up their attention. The places they loved. The people who shaped them. The small contributions that went unnoticed while they were alive but are visible now in retrospect. Services at Loudon Funeral Home typically run twenty to forty minutes depending on structure. The obituary itself should be long enough to answer the question "Who was this person?" and short enough that someone skimming it gets the answer in under a minute. That means roughly 150 to 250 words of actual content beyond the factual skeleton. If the family wants a longer piece, consider a separate memorial essay for the funeral program or a local newspaper sidebar. The obituary in the paper stays tight. The program allows expansion.
A Note on Timing
Most newspapers require obituaries to be submitted within forty-eight hours of publication, and some charge by the line or by the word. This creates pressure to write quickly, and pressure produces generic writing. If the family cannot agree on details, write the factual skeleton first and leave bracketed placeholders for the character sections. Complete those within a few days once the immediate grief period settles. The obituary can be revised after publication if a significant detail was missed, though corrections are usually noted briefly at the bottom. The best obituaries I have written were not the ones composed under deadline. They were the ones where someone took a week to think about it and then came back with a single perfect sentence that said everything. One family member described a father who fixed every broken toy in the house and then hid the evidence so the children would never know he had intervened. That one sentence replaced six paragraphs of general praise. It explained the man completely. That is what you are looking for. Not the resume. The single revealing detail that makes the whole picture click into focus.
