Writing Obituaries That Actually Fit the Dead
I have been doing funeral home obituary writing for about fourteen years. Not all of them for Evans, though I have handled quite a few there over the years. The work itself is not complicated, but people tend to overthink it or treat it like a formality. It is neither. The basic process starts the moment the family calls. You get the vital facts - full name, date of death, surviving relatives, service details. Then you sit down with whatever the family gives you, which is usually either a wall of raw memory or a single sentence that says he was a good guy. Both require the same amount of work to reshape into something publishable.
Unveiling The Faces Of Lenoir Honoring The Departed Through Evans Funeral Home Obituaries
Lenoir obituaries have a particular rhythm. The town is small enough that nearly everyone reading the paper knows someone named in that block of text. That changes how you write it. You cannot be vague, because vague sounds like you are hiding something. You also cannot be overly detailed, because Mrs. Gable next door will call you on Thursday to ask why you left out her uncle's third wife. Here is how I handle it. I take the standard template - name, age, date of death, place of death, survivors, service info - and I fill it with whatever the family can verifiedly confirm. If they say he served in the Navy, I verify it before printing. I learned that the hard way in 2012 when a family claimed their father was a Vietnam veteran with a Bronze Star. He was a truck driver in the Army who never left Georgia. The family did not know the difference, but half the readership did, and the phone calls were not pleasant. I now ask for DD-214 copies or at least a service number before listing any military honors. The survivors section is where most mistakes happen. People forget step-relatives, or they include an ex-spouse out of habit, or they leave out a child who passed ten years ago. I always run the list back to the family and ask them to confirm each name individually. I read it aloud to them. It takes thirty seconds and prevents three hours of correction requests later.
Evans has a standard length limit - roughly two hundred fifty words for the free online posting, four hundred if they are paying for the expanded print version. I do not count every word manually. I use a simple word counter in Google Docs and pad or trim accordingly. Two hundred fifty words is actually quite a lot if you write cleanly. You can fit a full life summary, the important relationships, the service details, and a brief mention of what mattered to the person without turning it into a novel. The real problem comes with people who want to include poetry or religious passages. Families love to add them. They feel like it softens the hardness of the announcement. My advice is to use them sparingly. One short verse or a single line of Scripture is fine. Three stanzas of Wallace Stevens belongs in a memorial program, not an obituary. The newspaper charges by the line sometimes, and the funeral home does not want to eat that cost. I have found that the most effective obituaries are the ones that name a specific habit or detail. Not he loved fishing, but he fished off the dock at Lake Lenoir every Saturday morning until his hands could no longer tie a proper knot. The second one tells you something true about the person. The first one is filler that everyone recognizes and nobody remembers.
Get the Full Details
If you are writing an obituary for someone at Evans right now, start with the facts and move outward. Get the dates correct. Verify the relationships. Keep the language plain. Do not try to make the person sound better than they were. The community will notice if you polish too hard, and honest writing respects the dead more than decorative writing ever will. The turnaround time at Evans is usually twenty-four hours from receipt of information to publication. If the family needs it sooner, call the front desk directly and ask for the evening editor. They can squeeze it into the next morning's online edition if you get the info in before four PM. Weekend deaths sometimes mean Monday or Tuesday publication depending on staffing. I do not recommend using a pre-written obituary template you found online. They are almost always wrong for this region. The family structures, the local institutions, the way people here talk about death - it is all slightly different from the generic version you will find on Google. Adapting a template usually looks like you adapted a template.
When in doubt, keep it short and factual. A clean obituary gets read. A bloated one gets skimmed and forgotten, which is the last thing anyone wants for their family member.
