How to write an obituary

An obituary has two jobs: tell the people who need to know, and say something true about the person. Everything else is optional, including publishing in a newspaper at all.

Write the facts first and the sentences second. That order prevents most of the arguments, because the arguments are almost never about prose.

Gather these before writing

Get this from one reliable source rather than assembling it from memory around a table, and check spellings against documents.

• Full legal name, including maiden name and any name they were commonly known by
• Age, date of birth, city of birth
• Date of death, city of death
• Parents' names, including mother's maiden name
• Spouse's name, date of marriage, and whether the spouse is living
• Children and their spouses, in birth order
• Grandchildren and great-grandchildren, by name or by count
• Siblings, living and deceased
• Immediate family who died first
• Education, military service with branch and years, career and employers
• Membership in a congregation, union, or organization
• Service details: date, time, place, and whether it is public
• Where to send donations, if the family prefers that to flowers

The details that get corrected publicly later are almost always name spellings and the order of children. Confirm both with someone who would know.

The structure

1. The announcement. Name, age, city, date of death. Optionally where they died and a neutral phrase about the circumstances.

Margaret Ellen Doyle, 84, of Lincoln, died on September 14, 2026, at home.

2. The life. Born where and to whom, education, service, career, the marriage. Two to four sentences that make the shape of a life visible.

3. The person. One or two specifics that could not belong to anyone else. This is the part people remember, and the failure mode is generic virtue. "She was kind" could describe a million people. "She kept a running list of every bird she saw from the kitchen window, forty years of it" describes one.

Write one concrete thing. A habit, an object, a phrase they always used, something they were known for locally.

4. Survived by. See below, because this is where families fight.

5. Preceded in death by. Usually parents, a spouse, and any children or siblings who died first.

6. The service. Date, time, location. Say plainly if it is private.

A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. on Saturday, September 21, at St. Mark's Church, 400 Elm Street. Burial is private.

7. Donations. Name the organization and how to give. If you would rather have flowers, say nothing.

8. Thanks, optionally. A hospice, a care facility, a neighbor. Keep it short.

Who decides the "survived by" list

This causes more conflict than the rest of the obituary combined, usually when someone is left off or listed in a way they object to: a stepchild, an estranged child, a long-term unmarried partner, an ex-spouse who is the parent of the children.

The blunt answer is that an obituary is not a legal document and no rule governs who must be listed. In practice the person controlling the funeral arrangements controls the obituary, and that authority comes from your state's disposition statute rather than from the will.

Those ladders vary. New York's runs a designated person, spouse, domestic partner, adult children, parents, siblings, and onward. Texas runs a designated person, spouse, any one adult child, either parent, any one adult sibling, then the executor. So whether an unmarried partner has standing at all is a state-by-state question. See can an unmarried partner make funeral decisions.

Four things defuse most of it:

Decide who is drafting, once, at the start. Most fights begin with two people writing in parallel.

Use "survived by" inclusively where you can. Listing a stepchild as a stepchild, or naming a partner as a partner, costs nothing and prevents a permanent injury.

Handle estrangement by omission rather than by statement. Leaving someone out reads as quiet. Explaining why reads as an accusation, in print, permanently.

Put the full version online. Print is billed by the line and forces exclusions that feel like judgments. Online has no line limit, so more people fit.

Writing about a complicated person

Not everyone is easy to write about, and the standard template assumes a relationship that did not always exist.

You are not obliged to write a tribute. Accuracy and brevity are legitimate choices. A short factual notice announcing the death and the arrangements, with no character assessment at all, is a complete and respectable obituary.

For something in between, describe rather than praise. "He worked at the plant for thirty-one years and kept a garden" is true without requiring the writer to claim feelings they do not have.

What causes regret is using the obituary to settle it, in either direction: inventing warmth that was not there, or airing the grievance publicly. Both are permanent, and both are read by people who were not part of it.

What it costs

Print obituaries are typically priced by the line, often with a separate photo fee, and the range is wide enough that the only reliable number is the one your paper quotes. Small-town papers commonly run in the low hundreds of dollars. Major metropolitan papers can run well into four figures, with a photo adding meaningfully on top.

Those are published ranges from industry sources rather than a surveyed statistic, so call the paper and ask for its per-line rate and photo fee before writing to length.

Cheaper routes, in rough order:

• Funeral home website, often included at no extra charge.
• Online-only obituary sites and memorial pages, frequently free.
• Social media, free, and where most people will actually see it.
• A newspaper's online death notice, usually cheaper than print with far more room.
• A short print notice plus a full online obituary, the standard way to control cost without cutting content.

One billing detail worth knowing. If the funeral home pays the newspaper on your behalf and passes the charge along, that is a cash advance item under the FTC Funeral Rule, and the rule requires such charges to be disclosed. Ask whether the quoted price includes a markup on the publication fee, and ask to see the newspaper's own invoice. See what the FTC Funeral Rule covers.

Before you publish

Two practical cautions.

Watch what you disclose. A published obituary is a public record identifying a recently deceased person and their surviving relatives, and identity fraud against the recently dead is routine. Full date of birth, mother's full maiden name, and a home address together are the classic set. Consider leaving out the birth date and the address, and notify the credit bureaus early. See the after-death checklist.

An obituary listing a service time is a published notice of when nobody will be home. Worth a thought about the house.

Then read it aloud once, check every name against a document, and have one other family member read it before submission. Print corrections are not free, and online corrections still leave the original in circulation.

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Before the Funeral Home has an obituary drafting page with the facts checklist, plus space for the service details and the survivor list, so the writing starts from collected facts rather than a group text at midnight. See what is inside