Writing Obituaries That Actually Mean Something
I've been doing obituary work for funeral homes for about twelve years now, and the thing nobody tells you is that the real skill isn't in the writing itself. It's in knowing when to stop. My first year, I was turning out three-hundred-word essays on every deceased person who walked through the doors. Then I started getting feedback from families about how impersonal everything felt, and I realized I'd been treating obituaries like formal reports instead of love letters. Cornerstone Funeral Home has been doing this differently than most places in our region for a while. They're not the only ones, but they're one of the few that made their obituary approach more than just a checkbox service. Here's what that actually looks like in practice. The obituary starts before the family even gets to the funeral home. I watch them collect information at intake - not just dates and places, but the weird little stories that make a person real. My colleague used to ask if someone liked gardening or what their favorite color was. Now she asks what song they hummed in the shower and who they called on a bad day. The difference shows up in the final piece.
The Process
When I take on an obituary, I work through the information in a specific order. First, I get the factual backbone - full name, age, date of passing, survivors. This part has to be accurate because newspapers will publish it exactly as submitted, and if you get a grandmother's maiden name wrong, people notice. I usually confirm dates against death certificates rather than family memory, because grief makes everyone a little unreliable with specifics. Then comes the personality section. This is where Cornerstone's approach differs from the template model most funeral homes use. Instead of asking "Tell me about their hobbies," they ask questions like "What did they do every Sunday morning without fail?" or "Who was the first person they called when something good happened?" The answers create obituaries that feel like someone actually knew the person. I write in present tense when I'm describing things the person loved. Past tense for accomplishments and facts. This isn't a style rule I made up - it's something I learned from reading hundreds of obituaries across different publications. Present tense creates immediacy. Past tense creates history. Getting the mix wrong makes everything read flat.
A Specific Problem I Encountered
Last fall, I was working with a family whose mother had passed after a long illness. The straightforward approach would have been to emphasize her battles and courage and all that. What they actually wanted was for people to remember how she made terrible coffee every single morning and how she could find a parking spot anywhere, even during rush hour. That's the obituary I wrote. The son was worried it wouldn't feel respectful enough. It was. It was more respectful than any formal "beloved matriarch who fought valiantly" garbage. People came back after the service and told him those were the first words they'd seen about their mom that didn't make them feel like she'd been reduced to a medical condition. Here's the workaround I developed for these situations: when families are struggling to articulate what mattered, I ask them to describe the person's hands. What were their hands like? Did they fiddle with things? Were they always warm? Hands tell you more about a person's daily existence than any accomplishment list ever could.
Get the Full Details
Technical Considerations
Most newspapers charge by the line or by the inch. A typical obituary runs about two inches, which costs between forty and two hundred dollars depending on the market. Online obituaries are free and can be as long as you want, but nobody reads past five hundred words unless they knew the person well. The photo matters more than people realize. I've seen dead people look like they're posing for a passport photo in some obituaries. Cornerstone encourages families to submit casual photos - the ones where the person looks like themselves. If the best photo you have is from twenty years ago and they look nothing like the person now, just say so and I'll work around it. Distribution timing is another thing nobody mentions. Most papers run obituaries on the day before or the day of service. If you're posting online, you can release it immediately after the service or before, depending on whether the family wants it to serve as a memorial or as a practical announcement. I ask both questions and let them decide.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
The biggest one is over-editing. Families will send me something they wrote and it's full of corporate-speak phrases like "passed away peacefully in her sleep surrounded by loved ones." Every deceased person in America passed away peacefully in their sleep surrounded by loved ones. It's filler. Cut it. The specific detail about how she always woke up before everyone else and made pancakes on weekends is worth a thousand generic sentences. Another mistake is forgetting the service details. The obituary needs to tell people when and where the service is, but also where the burial is and whether there's a reception. People show up to funerals because they saw that information somewhere. If you omit it, they might not know where to go. Social media presence is the new consideration. Cornerstone has started offering families the option to post shorter versions on Facebook and Instagram, with links to the full obituary. The shortened versions are usually half the length and focus on the most personal details. It's a different format entirely, and I treat it that way.
When Template Obituaries Are Appropriate
Sometimes a straightforward approach is what the family actually wants. Not everyone wants their life story told through pancake recipes and parking lot heroics. Military service members often prefer the formal structure. Religious communities may have specific traditions about how death should be announced. I always ask whether they want something traditional or something personal, and then I write accordingly. The key insight I've learned is that "personal" doesn't mean "informal." Some of the most moving obituaries I've written follow strict traditional structures. What makes them work is the specific detail woven into those structures. A traditional military obituary becomes powerful when you mention which unit the person served in and what medal they received, rather than just saying "served our country faithfully." If you're dealing with Cornerstone Funeral Home or any funeral home about to write an obituary, bring your stories. Don't worry about whether they're important enough. The coffee habit, the terrible singing, the way they always knew exactly when to leave a room - those are the things that make an obituary read like a real person instead of a resume.
