Writing An Obituary That Actually Captures Who Someone Was
I spent years helping families put together obituaries after rough funerals and complicated family situations. The last one that really stuck with me was Trigg Kiser, and when I saw the tribute titled Trigg Kiser Obituary Remembering A Life Filled With Unwavering Spirit And Unrelenting Passion, it made me think about how these things are supposed to work and where they usually go wrong. An obituary is not a resume. It is a compressed summary of a human being that gets read by people who either knew them or are making a decision about whether to attend the service. The job of the writer is to make the dead person feel like a person again in the space between the funeral home brochure and the cemetery fence. Here is the practical way to handle it.
Getting The Core Details Right
Start with the bare facts before you write anything emotional. Full name, date of birth, date of death, city of residence at the time, and the surviving family members. Get these checked twice. I once saw a published obituary that listed the wrong death date because the family assumed it was the date of the service, not the date of passing. The corrections run around $75 per paper and nobody wants that call. After the facts come the biographical section. This is where most people ramble. Keep it to three or four sentences maximum for the life history. Where they were born, what they did for work or school, any military service, any notable achievements. Not everything needs to be here. The obituary is an entry point, not an autobiography.
The Hard Part: Making It Sound Like Them
This is the part people struggle with. You have to capture someone's actual voice and energy without turning it into a hagiography or a comedy routine. Trigg's obituary got this right because it did not try to pretend the person was perfect. It described real traits. Unwavering spirit. Unrelenting passion. Those are not empty phrases when they are backed by specific examples in the text. When I worked on these, I always asked the family for three specific stories. Not generalizations. Actual moments. What happened at Thanksgiving that showed their personality. How they reacted when something went wrong. What they were stubborn about. Those stories become the backbone of the piece. The pitfall here is over-editing. Families will want to soften everything. They will ask you to remove mentions of struggles, arguments, or health problems. I understand why they do it. But an obituary that only lists virtues reads like a corporate press release. The most memorable ones acknowledge the whole shape of a life, even briefly.
Get the Full Details
Obituary Remembering A Life Filled With Unwavering Spirit And Unrelenting Passion
The title format that got used for Trigg is actually a fairly common structure. The main headline states the subject, and the subtitle adds the thematic lens through which the family wants people to remember them. It works because it gives readers an immediate sense of who the person was without having to dig through paragraphs. If you are writing one of these, keep the title under ten words if possible. Long titles get truncated in newspaper listings and on digital memorial sites. You lose the impact that way.
Where People Mess Up The Details
Donor information is the most common error. If the family wants donations to go to a charity instead of flowers, get the exact name of the organization, its tax ID number if requested, and the mailing address or website. I have seen donation requests sent to defunct organizations because someone Googled the wrong thing. It happens more often than you would think. Service details need to be unambiguous. Some people write "service will be held" without a time or location. Others list the funeral home address but not the cemetery or venue. Pick one format and stick with it. Include whether the service is private or public. Family disputes over this are surprisingly common after the fact. Digital publications also require a high quality photo. Not a phone snapshot from a birthday party. A clear headshot or a well lit candid from adulthood. Grainy images get rejected by many newspaper portals on sight.
A Workaround For Tough Cases
Sometimes you will get a family that cannot agree on what to say. This happened to me with a case where the deceased had two very different public personas. One side of the family wanted a formal tone. The other wanted something casual and funny. What I ended up doing was writing two versions, showing them to each other, and letting them each highlight the parts they could live with. We merged those highlights into a single draft. It took three extra hours but it prevented the piece from never getting published. The same approach works when families disagree about whether to mention a past marriage, an estranged child, or a legal issue. Neither side gets everything they want, but both get enough that the final version does not become a source of conflict.
Publication Logistics
Newspapers charge by the line or by the inch. The average obituary runs between 150 and 300 words. Going over that limit will cost you. Digital platforms like Legacy.com or FuneralVerse let you go longer but most readers will not scroll past two screens. Submission deadlines vary. Major metropolitan papers often require publication five to seven days in advance. Smaller local papers can sometimes publish within 48 hours. Always confirm the deadline with the specific publication before you finalize the text. If you need a template or a starting point for drafting your own, most funeral homes provide a basic form. It is not great, but it covers the required fields. From there you can shape the actual content.
