Writing Something That Actually Matters When Someone Dies
Most obituaries read the same because people copy the same templates. A funeral home sends you a one-page Word doc with brackets for name, age, surviving relatives, and a suggestion to mention a hobby. Half the people finishing those documents are doing it at 2am after crying for three hours. The result is flat, interchangeable prose that nobody remembers. The approach I use comes from decades of watching what actually gets read versus what gets skimmed. A dignified obituary does three things in order: it establishes who the person was outside of their relationship to the living, it gives enough factual detail that someone who didn't know them can still place them in the world, and it includes at least one specific, grounded detail that no template could produce. Everything else is decoration. I learned this the hard way when I was helping my mother's cousin write her husband's obituary. The guy had been a structural engineer who designed water treatment facilities for three small Midwest cities. The standard template push us toward listing his employers and saying he was a devoted family man. I suggested we instead lead with what he actually built. The obituary opened with a line about the chlorine contact tanks he oversaw at the Cedar Falls plant, a sentence about the Saturday mornings he spent fixing carburetors on a 1978 Ford, and then the basic survivor list. That piece ran in three newspapers and I still get emails from people who say they recognized his name from their hometown water reports. Two people tracked him down just to say thanks for getting the detail right.
Here is the process I use now when someone asks me to help draft one. First, collect raw material without filtering it. Spend twenty minutes writing down everything about the person on a plain piece of paper. Not facts for a resume. The weird habit they had. The lunch spot they went to every Thursday. The way they always folded the newspaper before putting it down. These details are what separate a document from a notice. Most people skip straight to dates and employment history because they feel it's "appropriate." It isn't. It's filler. Second, determine the actual audience. Is this going to be read by people who knew the deceased well, or by strangers who just need context about who died? This changes everything. A local newspaper obituary for a widely known person requires a different structure than one for someone who lived a quiet life in a suburb. I once worked with a family whose father had no extended family nearby and whose professional contacts were scattered across the country. The obituary needed to function as a biographical anchor, not just a death announcement. We expanded it to roughly five hundred words instead of the usual two hundred and included a paragraph about his career trajectory with specific projects named. Response rate from people reaching out doubled compared to their mother's obituary the year before, which had been generic.
Third, write the opening line before you write anything else. This is the part most people get wrong. They start with "John Smith, 72, of Springfield, passed away peacefully on..." That sentence is functional but it says nothing about the person. Try starting with something that captures a genuine attribute. "John Smith spent forty-three years repairing bicycle chains and teaching neighborhood kids how to do it themselves." That opening tells you who the person was in one breath. Then follow it with the basic facts. The date, the location, the age. Then the biographical detail. Then the survivor list. Then the service information. Fourth, get the survivor list right and in the right order. Most style guides suggest listing spouse first, then children, then grandchildren, then siblings. This is a convention, not a rule, and it can feel cold when a surviving spouse is listed before adult children who cared for the deceased daily. I always ask the family which ordering feels honest. There is no universal correct answer here. The only mistake is omitting someone who would reasonably expect to be included. Fifth, check the word count against the publication's limits before you consider it finished. Local newspapers charge by the line or by the word. Some run obituaries for free only if they come through the funeral director. If you are submitting directly to a paper, call their desk and ask about current pricing. An obituary that costs four hundred dollars to print because it exceeded the free allowance is a problem that takes three minutes to avoid.
Get the Full Details
Common mistakes that make obituaries worse: Overusing adjectives. Words like devoted, loving, cherished, and wonderful appear in nearly every obituary and mean almost nothing. A person who volunteered at the animal shelter every Tuesday is more devoted than someone described as deeply devoted. Show the devotion. Replace the adjective with the action. Including medical details. Whether it was cancer or a heart attack belongs in the private family conversation, not in a public document. Mentioning the cause of death adds nothing for readers who did not know the person and can cause unnecessary pain for those who did. A single sentence about the circumstances if the family wants it is sufficient. Otherwise, skip it entirely.
Using funeral home boilerplate. Phrases like "passed into eternal rest" or "was called home" assume a religious framework that may not match the deceased or the family. Even secular families sometimes include these out of habit. It is fine to include them if they are authentic, but they should be chosen deliberately, not copied from a template.
Where This Approach Falls Short
Writing a dignified obituary takes time that grieving people rarely have. The process I described usually requires two to three hours of focused work for someone unfamiliar with it, or about forty-five minutes for someone who has done it before. That is not trivial. It assumes you have access to someone who knew the deceased well enough to recall specifics, and that is not always the case. Adult children may have strained relationships with their parent. Spouses may have lost their own memories to early dementia. In those situations the obituary will be thinner regardless of technique, and that is an honest limitation worth acknowledging upfront. Another issue is the tension between brevity and dignity. Some publications force severe cuts. A local paper may cap obituaries at two hundred fifty words. You cannot include three grounded details and a full career summary within that constraint. When that happens, you prioritize the single most distinctive fact about the person and trim everything else to the bone. It is worse than ideal but it is the reality of most community newspaper submissions. For people who cannot write this themselves, hiring a professional obituary writer is reasonable. The cost ranges from seventy-five to two hundred fifty dollars depending on the region and turnaround time. Funeral homes often offer this as an add-on service but their in-house writers tend to default to template output because they process high volume. A freelance writer who specializes in biographical writing will generally produce something more specific, though you should vet them by asking to see two or three recent examples rather than accepting a sample from their website.
The final thing to keep in mind is that an obituary is never the definitive account of a life. It is a public notice written under emotional pressure with incomplete information. Getting it slightly imperfect is acceptable. Getting it generic is not. The difference usually comes down to one or two specific, truthful details that no template would ever suggest. Find those and the rest follows naturally.
