How to Write an Obituary That Actually Sounds Like Them

An obituary does two jobs at once. The first is plain and practical: it tells people someone has died, and when and where to gather. The second is quieter and lasts longer: it becomes the first draft of how a person will be remembered. Years from now, a grandchild searching a name online may find nothing but these few paragraphs. That is worth taking seriously — not perfectly, not eloquently, just seriously. You do not need to be a writer. You need to have known the person, and you did.

Start with the skeleton, because it steadies your hands. Full legal name, plus the name people actually used — if everyone called him Bud, say so, or half the town will not know who died. Age, date of death, and the city where he lived. You do not have to state a cause of death, and in Missouri as anywhere else, no rule says you must. Many families simply leave it out.

Then the framework the rest hangs on: who survives them — spouse, children, grandchildren, siblings — and who went before them, usually parents and any spouse or children who died earlier. List service details if they are set: visitation, funeral or memorial, burial, with dates, times, and full addresses, because out-of-town cousins will be navigating by this paragraph. If the family prefers donations to flowers, name the charity, church, or cause, and make it specific enough to find.

Now the part that matters. Once the skeleton is standing, resist the urge to drape it in adjectives. Loving, devoted, kind, generous — every obituary says these things, which is exactly why they say nothing. One true story beats ten adjectives every time. Not that she was generous, but that she kept twenty-dollar bills folded in her Bible to slip to whoever looked tired at church. Not that he was hardworking, but that he farmed all day and still rebuilt the neighbor kid's bicycle at the kitchen table that night.

Call it the specific detail rule: write down what she always said, what he always fixed, what was always in the pocket or the pantry or the truck. The phrase she used when you left the house. The team he never gave up on. The recipe nobody else can get right. Ask three family members for one memory each and you will have more than enough. Specifics are the difference between a form filled out and a person on the page.

This is also why the automatic phrases deserve a hard look. Passed away peacefully surrounded by family has been written so many times it slides past the eye without landing. If it happens to be true and you want it, keep it — but notice that it tells a stranger nothing about who this was. Wherever you find a sentence that could appear in anyone's obituary, ask whether you can trade it for one that could only appear in this one.

When you have a draft, read it aloud. This is the single best test there is. Sentences that look fine on the screen will snag in your mouth, and stiffness you did not notice will announce itself. If somewhere in the reading you smile, or your voice catches, you have found the true part. If it reads like a form, go back to the stories.

Before anything is published, have a second family member read it — not for style, but for facts. Grief is hard on details. Names get misspelled, a granddaughter gets skipped, a wedding year drifts by a decade, and these small errors sting for a long time in print. A second set of eyes catches what yours, understandably, cannot right now.

As for where it goes: the funeral home will almost always post the obituary on its website at no extra charge, and that is where most people will read it. Newspapers, including Missouri papers, typically charge by the line or the inch, and a full obituary with a photo can run into hundreds of dollars — worth asking about rates before you write long. Free online memorial pages exist too, and they hold what a paid notice cannot: the whole story, all the photos, a guestbook where friends add their own memories. PartingPoint's companion project, LastingFarewells, offers exactly that kind of page.

If you are staring at a blank page tonight, do not start with the facts. Start with one story — the one the family keeps retelling, the one that sounds like her. Write it down plainly, the way you would tell it across a kitchen table. Once that story is on the page, the names and dates and service times will arrange themselves around it, and you will find you have written not just a notice, but a beginning of remembering.