Writing Obituaries That Actually Work
I spend too much of my week reading submissions from families trying to capture a life in a few hundred words. Most of them are fine. Some are terrible. The ones that stick around—the ones people actually read and share—share a few predictable traits. Understanding how Wight Comes Funeral Home handles their obituary process helped me figure out why certain notices resonate and others vanish within hours. Wight Comes Funeral Home has a reputation for letting families write their own obituaries with minimal editorial interference. They don't force you into a template. They also don't offer a ghostwriting service. You turn in what you have, they run it, and it goes live on their website and in the local paper. That freedom is valuable. It's also where most people struggle. I've seen families sit on a draft for three weeks because they were trying to get the opening sentence perfect. The truth is the opening line matters far less than the details that follow. The body of the notice is what people scan for. Who did this person love? What did they do for work? Were they involved in anything that shaped the community? That's the stuff that gets passed around.
Here's the workflow I recommend when you're sitting down to write something for Wight Comes specifically. First, draft the bare facts without worrying about tone. Full name, date of birth, date of death, city of residence, surviving family members. Get that skeleton written. It takes about twelve minutes. Then layer in the personal details. A hobby they kept going even when it made no sense financially. A habit that annoyed everyone but was fundamentally endearing. Specifics like that are what separate a generic notice from one that feels like a real person. The submission process itself is straightforward. You email your draft to their obituary desk or submit it through their website. They typically respond within four hours during business days. If there's an issue—wrong dates, a missing survivor, something that looks like it needs clarification—they call you. I've never had a draft rejected outright. They edit for factual errors and basic grammar but otherwise leave your voice intact. That means your wording choices matter more than they might in a newspaper where a copy editor might rewrite the whole thing.
What People Get Wrong
The most common mistake I see is writing the obituary as if it's a eulogy. It's not. A eulogy is spoken to a room of people who already knew the deceased. An obituary reaches people who may have known them peripherally or not at all. It needs to answer questions they wouldn't think to ask at a funeral. People also overload the opening paragraph with biographical data. Five years of education, three jobs, a list of accomplishments that reads like a resume. Skip the resume stuff. The funeral home website and local paper both have character limits in practice even if they don't state one explicitly. After a certain word count, editors start trimming and you lose the pieces you cared about most. Keep it under three hundred words if you can. It's enough space to be complete without becoming a textbook. Another pitfall is the passive voice trap. "He was loved by many" means almost nothing. "He coached little league baseball for eighteen years and showed up to every game even when his wife begged him not to" means something. Specificity does the emotional heavy lifting. You don't need dramatic language. You need evidence.
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A Problem I Ran Into
Last fall I worked with a family where the deceased had been married twice and had children from both marriages. The second wife wanted her children included. The first wife felt slighted and threatened to pull out of the service entirely. The family didn't know how to structure the survivor list without triggering another argument. The workaround was simple but not obvious if you haven't dealt with this before. We listed all surviving children together under a single "Survived by" heading without grouping them by mother. We mentioned both spouses by name in the body text separately. That satisfied everyone because nobody was erased and nobody was given visual priority. Wight Comes didn't comment on the arrangement. They just ran it. Sometimes the solution is structural, not editorial.
Things No One Tells You
The obituary is not the final word on someone's life. It's a notice with biographical content. People will read it and then look elsewhere if they want more. Including a link to a memorial website or a photo gallery on the Wight Comes page is worth doing. Their platform supports embedded images now, so adding two or three photos costs nothing and significantly increases engagement. I've seen notices with photos get shared forty times more than identical notices without them. Timing matters more than most people realize. Publishing the obituary on a Friday afternoon means it sits through the weekend with minimal visibility. Publishing on a Tuesday morning catches the paper cycle and the website traffic. If you're working with Wight Comes and the death occurred on a Thursday, ask them to hold the publish until Tuesday. They've done this before and won't question the request. I have. There's also the matter of florist links. Wight Comes includes a small florist suggestion box on their obituary pages. Families often miss this and end up fielding calls from people asking where to send flowers. Including a note like "Flowers may be sent to..." with a specific shop name saves everyone time. The funeral home doesn't push a particular florist. They'll let you write whatever you want there.
When This Approach Fails
Self-written obituaries work best when at least one person in the family has time to sit down and draft something. If everyone is scattered across different states and communication is fragmented, the process drags. In those cases, having one designated writer who collects notes from other family members and compiles everything into a single document is faster than trying to reach consensus. I've watched families argue over phrasing for days when they could have had it published in a day with one person making the call. Sometimes the subject's history makes an honest obituary difficult. Military discharge details, legal troubles, estranged family members—these are real complications. Wight Comes won't print something defamatory, but they also won't investigate your claims. If you include something controversial, be prepared for it to generate comments or calls. The funeral home's office handles those calls. They don't filter the content but they do manage the fallout. If you're comfortable with that, go ahead. If you'd rather avoid the noise, keep the notice factual and save the context for private channels. Writing about someone you've lost is harder than it looks. Not because the words are difficult but because you're doing it while exhausted and emotional. The practical advice here is boring for a reason. Facts first. Specific details second. Keep it under three hundred words. Submit early in the week. Let the people at Wight Comes do their job without second-guessing every line. The notices that last aren't the most beautifully written ones. They're the ones that sound like the person who died.
