Writing Obits That Actually Fit the Person
I've been reviewing and helping families refine obituaries for over a decade now. Hayes Samuels Funeral Home in Atlanta has set a bar that most other shops never reach, and it shows up most clearly in how they handle written memorial content. The obituaries there aren't template-driven fluff. They read like actual people lived them. The Timeless Elegance Of Hayes Samuels Funeral Home Obituaries A Sanctuary For Honoring Lives Welllived isn't just a tagline. It's a methodology. Here's how it works in practice and what you need to do if you're preparing one for someone you know.
Getting the raw material right
Before any writing happens, you need facts. Birth date, death date, places, surviving family, employment history, church affiliations, memberships, hobbies, military service if applicable. Standard stuff. But the difference at Hayes Samuels comes from how they go about collecting it. They don't just hand a family a checklist and wait. The staff will sit down, often multiple times, and ask follow-up questions that surface the things actually worth including. A standard obituary for an average adult runs about 300 to 500 words. Hayes Samuels obituaries tend to land in the 400 to 700 range because they include the specific details that make someone recognizable to people who knew them. The practical workflow looks like this. First call, you gather the bare dates and names. Second call or meeting, usually two to three days later, you pull the biographical color. Third pass is a draft review with the family. That sequence matters. Rushing it produces generic copy. Taking the time produces something people will actually read and keep.
The structure most funeral homes get wrong
Most obituaries follow the same skeleton. Born here. Died there. Survived by mother, father, siblings, children, grandchildren. Service information. Donations in lieu of flowers. That's not wrong. It's just incomplete as a portrait. Hayes Samuels writes obituaries in a different order than most places. They typically open with a sentence that captures what the person was actually like rather than leading with dates. Then they move through life milestones in rough chronological order but skip the parts that add nothing. Employment history stays only if it shaped the person or if they were notable in that field. Otherwise it's one line or omitted entirely. The section most families push hardest for is the list of survivors. The staff there will gently reframe that. A long list is necessary for acknowledgment. But reading down a laundry list of eighteen nieces and nephews kills the momentum. The workaround is grouping. Immediate family first, then extended family in one paragraph. That keeps the piece moving while still honoring everyone.
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Specific language choices that change the tone
This is where the elegance part comes in. Word selection does heavy lifting. Take a common phrase like "passed away peacefully surrounded by family." It appears in probably eighty percent of obituaries across the country. It's also nearly meaningless because most deaths in modern settings happen with family present. It adds zero information. At Hayes Samuels, the alternative is a single concrete sentence. "She passed at home on a Tuesday evening after a brief illness, with her daughter reading to her until the end." That tells the reader something real. It takes almost the same space. The difference is that one feels like a person and the other feels like boilerplate. Another common issue is adjectival bloat. Words like "beloved," "cherished," "devoted," "wonderful" get stacked on top of each other until the sentence collapses under its own weight. Use one strong adjective instead of three weak ones. "She was generous" is better than "She was a kind, loving, generous, giving soul." The latter sounds like a greeting card. The former sounds like a fact other people can confirm.
A real problem I ran into and how I fixed it
Last fall a family brought me a draft for a father who had died suddenly. The initial version was about 150 words and contained exactly what you'd expect from a rushed template. Dates, spouse, two children, one grandchild, service info at a local chapel, and a line asking for donations to a heart foundation because he'd had bypass surgery in 2012. The problem was that nobody who knew him would recognize him in that text. He was a high school football coach for thirty-two years. He ran a volunteer youth league on weekends. He collected vintage baseball cards and spent every Sunday morning at a specific diner fixing transmissions on old cars for free. None of that made it into the draft. The fix took about forty-five minutes of phone calls. I called his former assistant coach, his oldest player from the nineties, and his granddaughter, who was fourteen and knew more about his card collection than anyone else. Those three conversations produced the material. The revised obituary ran about 580 words and opened with the line about him coaching at North Atlanta High for three decades. It ended with the diner detail. That closing line caused more responses from readers than any other part. People wrote in with stories from the twenty-first century that had nothing to do with football.
The takeaway is that the people who knew the deceased best are usually not the ones writing the obituary. You have to extract the information from them deliberately. Don't assume it will surface on its own.
Service information and the practical details
This section is where most formatting errors happen. The date, time, and address of the service need to be correct to the minute. A wrong street name or a confusing chapel designation creates real problems for attendees. At Hayes Samuels, every service listing includes the full address, the specific chapel or room if the venue has multiple spaces, and a contact number for the funeral director handling arrangements. Donation instructions also cause unnecessary confusion. Writing "donations to the American Cancer Society" is vague when there are hundreds of local chapters. Specify the chapter name and address or include a link to the donation page. If the family prefers flowers, name the funeral home's preferred florist so people don't send arrangements to the wrong address.
Where the Hayes Samuels model breaks down
I need to be honest about the limitations. The approach I described works well when the family has the time and emotional bandwidth to participate in multiple drafting sessions. It does not work for rapid turnarounds. If someone dies on a Thursday and the service is Saturday morning, you are not going to produce a Hayes Samuels-level obituary. The logistics simply don't allow it. The model also depends on access to people who knew the deceased. If the person lived a very isolated life, had strained family relations, or died far from home, the source pool shrinks dramatically. In those cases the obituary will be thinner no matter how carefully you write it. There is no workaround for that except acknowledging the gap and prioritizing the verified facts over speculation. Another bottleneck is cost. Hayes Samuels includes professional obituary writing as part of their standard arrangement package. Other funeral homes charge extra for it or don't offer it at all. If you're working with a budget-constrained provider, you may need to draft it yourself and then have a professional edit it rather than starting from scratch.
Common pitfalls to avoid
Spelling errors in names are the most frequent mistake. Verify the spelling of every surviving family member. Check it against a birth certificate, a family tree site, or a direct message to the person themselves. A misspelled name in a published obituary is painful for the person affected and reflects poorly on the preparation. Conflicting dates are the second most common issue. Sometimes the death certificate lists one date and the family remembers another due to time zone differences or the distinction between when death occurred and when it was pronounced. Pick one date and note the discrepancy if it matters to the family. Do not leave two different dates in the text. Overclaiming achievements is the third pitfall. Describing someone as "a world-renowned expert in their field" when they were a solid mid-level accountant in Memphis will not impress anyone who actually knew them. It will make people uncomfortable. Stick to what is true and measurable.
Review and publication process
The draft should be sent to at least two family members for review before publication. Give them forty-eight hours. That timeline accounts for the fact that grieving people process information slowly and may need to reread sections multiple times. Accept corrections. Argue only when a factual claim is verifiably wrong, not when someone disagrees with a stylistic choice. Once approved, the obituary should be submitted to the newspaper and the funeral home website simultaneously. Some papers have character limits that force trimming. Plan for that by writing the full version first and then creating a condensed cutdown, not the other way around. The condensed version should preserve the opening and closing lines because those carry the most weight.
What makes these obituaries endure
The reason the Hayes Samuels approach persists beyond trends is that it treats the obituary as a primary historical document rather than a transactional notice. Future generations will read these texts. They will search for names and dates and try to reconstruct what a person's life looked like from a few paragraphs. If those paragraphs contain only generic phrases, the record is useless. If they contain specific locations, relationships, habits, and context, someone fifty years from now can actually understand the person. That is the practical standard to aim for regardless of which funeral home you work with. You don't need to match their entire operation to apply the principle. Write the version of the truth that you would want to find if you were researching your own life someday.
