Writing Obituaries That Actually Work for Families
Most families come into Volzke Mortuary with no idea how to start. They're grieving, they've been on the phone all morning with insurance companies and the cemetery, and now they're supposed to write a public tribute in three hours. The process has gotten faster in the digital age, but the emotional weight hasn't changed at all. What's different is that everything lives online now, and that creates its own set of problems. The core job hasn't shifted. You gather facts, you tell the story of a life, and you give people a place to go to pay respects. But the digital layer changes the delivery. An obituary at Volzke Mortuary isn't just a newspaper clipping anymore. It's a webpage that stays up, it might get shared on social media, it might link to a memorial fund or a guest book, and it needs to be accurate across multiple platforms simultaneously. I've sat across from families who spent forty minutes agonizing over whether to list a predeceased sibling by full name or just as "survived by Aunt Carol." There's no wrong answer, but the hesitation slows everything down. My approach is to handle the bio and the family tree separately. Get the skeleton done first, fill in the personality later. You can always go back and add the sentence about how he taught his grandkids to fish, but if you try to write it all in one pass while the funeral is tomorrow, it comes out flat and rushed.
Here's something people don't expect: the obituary draft is not the final product. The version you send to the newspaper and the version you publish on the funeral home's website are two different files. Newspapers want compressed copy with strict word counts and upfront fees per line or per inch. The online version can be longer, it can include photos, it can have a timeline, and it can link to things. Mixing those up causes errors. I once had a family submit an obituary that was fine for the web but got cut off mid-sentence in the print edition because nobody accounted for the character limit. The workaround is simple. Draft the full version first. Then strip it down for print. Never the other way around. Another thing that catches people off guard is the lifespan of these pages. A printed obituary runs once and gets recycled. A digital obituary at Volzke Mortuary sits on a server indefinitely unless someone actively takes it down. That's actually useful, but it means you need to think about privacy. If the deceased had a controversial past, or if the family wants certain details kept out, you have to make those decisions before publishing, not after. I've seen cases where a family member posted the URL on Facebook and it got shared to the point where people who didn't know the deceased were leaving comments. Some of them were thoughtful, some of them were terrible. The family had no way to moderate it except to take the whole page down, which felt like erasing their father all over again. For the technical side, the process at Volzke Mortuary usually works like this. The family fills out an intake form with basic biographical data, you draft the obituary, they review and mark changes, you finalize, then you publish both the print and digital versions. The whole thing normally takes about two to three hours from first contact to live page if there are no major complications. Complications are usually either incomplete family information or disputes over what to include. Neither of those can really be rushed.
If you're helping someone through this, the most practical thing you can do is collect the survivor list before anything else. Names, relationships, locations. Write them down in a simple bullet list. That one step prevents three hours of phone calls the next day when someone remembers they forgot to mention a nephew in Colorado. It also prevents the awkward moment where a surviving spouse is listed before a deceased one because the order got mixed up. There's also a quirk with online memorials that nobody warns you about. Photo uploads. People want to include photos, and that's good. But high-resolution images from modern cameras slow down page load times significantly, and some of the hosting platforms used by funeral homes have upload limits. I usually suggest picking three to five strong photos and compressing them before submission. A 4MB portrait looks identical to a 400KB compressed version on a phone screen, but the page loads four times faster. That's not a minor detail. People visiting from their phones during commute hours will bounce if the page drags. The closing of the service matters too. Digital obituaries sometimes include links to charitable donations or memorial trees, and that's a nice touch, but it also introduces another variable. If the link goes to a third-party site that's down or redirects somewhere unexpected, it reflects badly on the family and on the funeral home. Always test every single link before publishing. I learned that the hard way when a donation link I included redirected to a defunct page because the charity had rebranded six months earlier. Nobody caught it in review.
Get the Full Details
One more practical note. Obituary writing is not the same as biographical writing. A biography tells the whole story. An obituary tells enough of the story to make the person feel present to people who are reading it for the first time. The difference is subtle but important. You don't need to list every job they held or every award they won. You need the details that answer the question someone is asking when they first hear about the death. Who was this person, who do they leave behind, and where can I go to say goodbye? The digital tools available now make that easier. Online forms, templated layouts, automated syndication to multiple publications. But none of that replaces the actual conversation with the family. The template can't ask the right follow-up questions. The software doesn't know whether to lead with military service or with the fact that they volunteer at the animal shelter every Saturday. That's still human judgment, and it's the part that matters most. If you're dealing with this yourself right now, the best path is to get the paperwork started early and leave room for the story to develop. Don't force a perfect final draft on day one. Get the structure out, then refine it as the family adds details throughout the week. Volzke Mortuary handles the logistics so you can focus on getting the details right, and the digital archives ensure that what you create isn't going anywhere. That's the actual advantage here. The legacy stays intact, and the family gets the closure that comes from knowing it will be there when people need it.
