Obituaries

Memorial Day honors loved ones lost to us. So do the obituaries you craft for them.

And grief at long hard last
breaks a way for the voice. —Virgil

For 16 years, I edited the member magazine for a national nonprofit that supported flutists of all kinds, famous and otherwise. My least favorite editorial task was writing content for the obituaries column. We had a loose standard of criteria for determining which flutists, among the thousands in our international circles, would be noted. The Galways and the Hubert Lawses of the mix would of course be written up when their time came. But we also paid tribute to the deaths of members who had been meaningful to our organization or to the schools where they taught or to the communities they served.

When I was new to the job, I met these people by reading about them and interviewing their families, friends, and colleagues. They started out as strangers, but by the time I had finished the writing, I was mourning for them.

Time passed. The day I realized that I’d logged serious time with this particular job was the day I had to write the first obit for an individual I had known personally. We had collaborated on projects; we’d worked together to craft articles for the magazine; we’d told jokes in the elevator and lunched together. This person I knew had, inconceivably, died, and I had to put aside my friendship, put on my editor’s hat, and write the obituary. This began happening more often. I hated getting to know and love people who had died before I knew them—but I really, really hated writing missives about people I had known. 

Still, as painful as they can be, writing obituaries can offer a kind of grace, a way of paying attention, that few other undertakings provide. They can be difficult emotionally, but they also can offer an opportunity to mourn out loud, to thank the person in your life for having been in it. They also can ease you into the grim, left-brain mindset you’ll need to get through all the bureaucratic horrors that lie ahead for you.

Trying to reduce a life into a few paragraphs is daunting, no question, but standardized, broadly recognized guidelines break the job into manageable chunks. They offer both a firm framework to hang your words onto and the flexibility to adjust as needed for the distinct individual you are memorializing.

And there are tons of sites with suggestions, examples, and templates to help you along. You’ll find among them consistent rules—what to include, where to include it—that crop up again and again, which means you can trust them. Variations pop up, too, so you can tailor the advice to fit what’s comfortable for you in creating the portrait you want to paint.

In addition to the online sources I suggest here, the funeral service you select will almost certainly have guidelines for you, and might even offer the option to write the obit, too, although this would mean passing up the chance to pay a final, loving tribute in a meaningful way.

Grammerly provides a short to-do list to get you on your way. It has four steps: gather information, consider the things that made your loved one who she was, organize the information you have (more on that below), and proofread.

The first two steps are self-explanatory and in your bailiwick. That third one, the organization part, that’s the rough bit, right?

Here’s what’s generally agreed on regarding the order in which to place each chunk of your information: announce the death and its particulars; provide biographical information; color in with personal descriptions; list family members; and provide service information. Some sites fill in with more chunks and more details for each chunk, but these broadly cover what should go where.

1. The death: Who died, when, of what cause, and at what age.

Betty Williams, president of the Glenwood League of Women Voters, died  on Tuesday, March 15, 2023. She was 72.

John Amherst, loving father of five and husband to Brian Lowry, passed away at age 55 on October 1, 2022, after suffering heart failure.  

Note that no cause of death was given for the first person illustrated. That’s because you’ve decided it’s nobody’s business, and that is fine. You can also leave off the age if you wish. I prefer the word “died” to euphemisms because I believe that laying bare what has happened is the best way to note the severity and pain of the event, and to honor the person who suffered it. But that’s just me. And “passed away” is certainly appropriate for folks who trust that the deceased has passed from here and is passing to somewhere else.

2. Biographical description: the blog Cake offers a boilerplate template with lots of bracketed generics like “name”, “City, State”, “area of study” for the biographical bit. Here’s a version with my made-up info italicized instead of the brackets.

Sky Waters was born on June 1, 1995, in Sagebrush, Nebraska. They graduated from Redbird high school in 2002 and went on to attend Northern Chalk Community College, where they graduated in 2007 with a degree in engineering. Waters married Lynn Michaels in 2005 after meeting him at a neighborhood picnic. Cloud Michaels was born in 2006, and his sister Amber followed a year later.

You don’t need to include this much information—or you can add a bit more. But keep it brief. The information in this and the next step can be expanded upon in the eulogy at the funeral.

3. Color with personal descriptions: Here’s both the most pleasurable and the most challenging. What made your loved one who she was? Did she have accomplishments or children or academic degrees or a career she was especially proud of? Did she like to travel? Take pride in her bootstrap success in life despite her lack of schooling or pedigree? Did she have hobbies, skills, friendships that made her who she was? Did she adore her niece? Did she have a wacky side? Did she collect things—pig tchotchkes, tea kettles, bathtub duckies, flutes, fine art?

In writing this section, be sparing with adjectives. A good portrait will show us who your mother or friend or boss was by what she did and said.

Ruth was a committed member of the Unitarian Universalist Church in Brookville, which she joined only a few years after its founding and where she served as president and in other governance positions, started and directed the choir, and founded the Chalice Circles small groups program.

There is one adjective (“committed”) and one adverb (“only”) in this paragraph, but the passage makes it very clear that Ruth was dedicated, well liked, and skilled in management. It also says a lot about her priorities as a caring person.

Your beloved’s “accomplishments” can be intimate, even day-to-day, and completely worthy of noting. FuneralBasics offers a sweet example.

John had a passion for painting. He also loved to bird watch, and he combined his two favorite hobbies to create extraordinary art. His paintings of various birds were much admired not only by friends and family, but also by all who frequented the coffee shops where his paintings were displayed. He was also an avid music lover and a collector of Beatles memorabilia. He was known for his quick wit, his infectious smile, and his kind and compassionate spirit.

Personally, I would cut that “extraordinary”—the next sentence tells us his art was good because it was “much admired” and because it was displayed in coffee shops. (One of the things I learned after a stint as an editor with a renowned art museum was that people in the visual arts, especially curators, describe most everything as extraordinary. You see the problem there, right?)

Grammerly discusses “traditional” versus “anecdote-driven” obituaries. I’ve been discussing traditional; here is an example of the opening for the latter, which sews the loved one’s passions and achievements right into the first paragraph:

On Sunday, May 8, 2022, Janice Francis Doe, loving partner, and mother of two, passed away at age fifty-six. An avid reader, Janice earned a bachelor’s degree in education and spent thirty-four years as a high school English teacher. She was named teacher of the year many times during her tenure as an educator and was known for having an open-door policy for any student looking for help—whether they were working on a college application, reviewing a paper, or seeking guidance in their lives.

This approach of slipping in an achievement very early is good for well-known people, too:

John Rogers, the longtime conductor of the Mantua Orchestra and composer of many ballads, died July 1, 2022. He was 98.

In this section, you might also want to follow the lede with a quote.

Estrella Jimenez, her husband, and their children, were close, lifelong family friends. “My kids sometimes called Kim their ‘first’ mom,” said Estrella. “I was their ‘second.’”

If you open with this kind of “here’s what she was best known for” right-out-of-the-gate start, perhaps followed by a quote, you can then go back and provide her biography. You’ll see this a lot in national obituaries of VIPs—a brief opening summary of the high points (or, if you’re Stephen Sondheim, say, a long one), and then a paragraph going all the way back to the beginning: “Stephen Joshua Sondheim was born in…”

4. Proofread. To this I would add Edit, which isn’t the same thing as proofreading and should come first. Set aside your piece for a day and then read it again and see what you can cut. What passive phrases (“in order to”) and verbs (“was”) can you strike? Where did you say something and then say it again in a different way in the very next sentence? Cut one of them. Set it aside and come back later and read it again and see what else you can cut. (Cutting almost always improves things; that’s why it is harder to write short pieces than long ones.)

Then you can proofread, which means turning off the creative editor and turning on the mindless dictionary. Spellcheck is fine, but only a first step: use your eyeballs or sight-assisted program as well. (Spellcheck doesn’t know that although you wrote the correctly spelled “her ten years,” you meant to write “her teen years.”) Look for misspellings, grammatical errors, missing punctuation, typos. (Don’t count on grammar check; it can be biased.)

Then ask a friend to read it. Ignore the friend’s advice on content if you like (“you left out how adorable she looked in that baby sweater I made her”) but be grateful when she finds a typo you missed even though you read it 17 times.

Another page of the earlier referenced Cake blog offers advice on what not to include that I didn’t come across elsewhere and that made me inordinately sad. This site notes a growing trend to leave out exact birth dates and locations because they make it easier for scammers to steal identities. Ditto with the birth name of the deceased’s mother for the same reason.

You decide whether or not to follow this advice. If this becomes common, it will be a great loss to historians, people wanting to learn more about their ancestry, and individuals close to the lost human being. But life in this century is hard. You decide.

The Cake blog has a lot of additional great advice, too, such as being sensitive to the realities of life: families with one parent or a community of “parents” rather than the Ozzie and Harriet mom-dad version, estranged or downright hostile family members or ex-spouses and how (and if) to include their names. It also offers a nice post-loss checklist for lots more than obituary writing.

Cake also advises against humor in obituaries. Other sites promote it, but I find their examples in poor taste. (But then, I find fart jokes in poor taste, and yet I have a highly educated, cultured, intellectual friend who finds them hilarious. So what do I know?) Further arguing against me, the examples offered online were of obits that went viral. I thought they were tacky, but a whole lot of folks apparently loved them.

Here is one viral obituary I liked very much, not just because it has humor in it but because it is inspiring.

When it comes to humor, I suggest you tread lightly. Still, you know your audience better than I do, so, hey, if you can pull it off, don’t let me stop you—done right, wit can be a marvelous addition. And humor in eulogies? If it fits, then the more, the better, say I. Laughter beats everything in this world.

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Lagniappe: The Beacon is an online newspaper serving Wichita. (Its name is an homage to the long-gone Beacon evening paper from back in the day when we received two daily papers.) Its offerings are good, and it can more deeply cover stories that our daily Eagle can’t always manage given the constraints of today’s local newspapers. Here’s an article on how to downsize.