Obituaries Weren't Always This Brutal
I've been writing death announcements for family members since 2008, and I can tell you the shift isn't subtle anymore. The format changed. The tone changed. The expectations around what constitutes a "proper" obituary changed too, and not in a direction that makes grief easier for anyone involved. Before the pandemic, obituaries followed a fairly rigid template. You listed the deceased's name, age, city, surviving family, work history, and maybe a single sentence about hobbies or character. The newspaper spaces were limited—usually a column inch or two—and that limitation enforced brevity. People couldn't ramble if they wanted to. The cost per line also kept things in check. That all collapsed during 2020. Memorial websites replaced print newspapers as the primary venue. Facebook groups became de facto guestbooks. The cost structure shifted from per-line pricing to essentially free digital hosting, which removed every natural constraint on length and emotional register. What happened next was a kind of arms race in grief performance.
I encountered a specific problem in early 2021 that still bothers me. My uncle died of COVID, and the family wanted an obituary that "captured the full truth" of what happened. One relative insisted we include the hospital visitation restrictions, the number of people allowed at his bedside, the ventilator details. Another sibling wanted to list every precaution the deceased had taken—masks, sanitizer, social distancing—to frame him as careful rather than unlucky. We spent three days arguing over whether mentioning the pandemic caused any trauma to readers or if it was necessary context. The final draft ran about eight hundred words. No newspaper would have published that. It went on a memorial website that got forty-seven comments, half of them from people who barely knew him correcting facts or adding their own stories. The trend that emerged isn't really about accuracy or completeness. It's about trauma signaling. Modern obituaries increasingly position the death as an event that demands acknowledgment of systemic failure, personal suffering, or institutional neglect. The death itself becomes secondary to the narrative around how it happened. I've seen obituaries that read more like legal complaints than remembrances—lists of denied requests, incorrect treatments, missed appointments with healthcare providers. These pieces generate outrage comments and shares, which families sometimes interpret as validation that the death mattered. Here's something most people don't realize about this shift. The pandemic obituary template isn't actually more informative than the traditional format. It's just more emotionally explicit. A standard 2019 obituary might say "died peacefully surrounded by family" and readers would fill in the appropriate emotional space. A 2023 obituary says "died alone while hospital staff prioritized other patients due to staffing shortages" and then expects you to feel the intended emotion directly spelled out. The assumption is that readers need the trauma explained to them rather than inferred.
I've also noticed that the pandemic created a new category of obituary writers—professional memorial authors who charge between $150 and $400 to transform a raw death notification into a polished grief narrative. These services have proliferated on platforms like Etsy and through funeral home partnerships. They use consistent structural elements: an opening that establishes the circumstances of death, a middle section detailing the sufferings endured, and a closing that explicitly names the emotional takeaway. The template works because it removes the cognitive load from grieving families who don't want to think about how to frame loss when they're already struggling. The downsides are real and I want to be blunt about them. First, these trauma-forward obituaries can retraumatize people who knew the deceased differently. If someone died from a drug overdose and the family writes "lost their battle with addiction after a long struggle with mental health," friends who knew the person was self-medicating to cope with chronic pain will read that framing and feel misrepresented. The polished narrative erases the messy truth in favor of something more palatable and more painful for those who actually knew the person. Second, there's a class dimension to this trend that rarely gets discussed. Professional obituary writers and memorial website packages cost money. Families with limited means still publish in newspapers where the old format persists out of necessity, not principle. This creates a two-tier system where wealthier deaths get elaborate trauma narratives and everyone else gets the standard template by default. The cultural signal is that certain lives are worth more emotional labor to memorialize.
Get the Full Details
Third, and this is the part most people miss, the pandemic obituary trend has shortened the actual lifespan of memorial content. An elaborate eight-hundred-word trauma narrative gets its engagement window in the first seventy-two hours and then dies. Traditional shorter obituaries circulate differently—they get shared sporadically over months and years as people find them through search or recommendation. The longer piece creates a consumption event; the shorter piece creates a lasting reference point. If your goal is genuine remembrance rather than performative grief, brevity usually wins. When I write obituaries now, I use a modified hybrid approach. I include the circumstances of death only when they're relevant to the person's story. My father's obituary mentioned he died at home after a long illness, which is factual but not emotionally manipulative. I listed his actual hobbies—the woodworking, the decades of volunteer fire service, the way he could fix anything with duct tape and patience. That got more meaningful comments than the trauma-forward pieces I've read. People wrote about specific memories, not generic sympathy statements. If you're dealing with this right now, here's what I'd suggest without any preachiness. Write the obituary yourself first, before anyone suggests adding pandemic context or institutional critique. Get the raw version down in twenty minutes. Then set it aside for a day. Come back and edit. If the final piece is under four hundred words and contains at least one specific, concrete detail about the person rather than the circumstances of their death, you're probably in the right zone. Longer pieces aren't wrong, but they serve a different purpose—and that purpose is usually about the living, not the dead.
The trend will likely persist. Memorial websites aren't going back to newspaper formats, and the cost structure that once enforced brevity is gone for good. But the people who understand what they're optimizing for tend to produce better results. If you're optimizing for shock value, trauma disclosure, or social media engagement, go ahead and write the long version. If you're optimizing for something the deceased would actually recognize as themselves, keep it tight and specific. Both approaches are valid. They just produce different kinds of grief.
