Oh, I'm so glad you brought up this important and difficult topic. I have not written one, but my parents are over 90 so I know I will. I've been preparing phrases that I know I will want to use, but I never thought to ask them! That's probably a good idea, especially for my one parent who likes to be in control lol.

When my Dad died, the funeral home people helped write the obituary. They asked a lot of questions about family, his life and hobbies and work and such. I don't think we customized it much from the usual template, but I'm sure you can add your own words to it.

My father did his own obit and planned his own funeral. He was 6 weeks shy of his 94th birthday when he had an aneurysm. (And he played golf 36 hours before,) Mother was 2 weeks shy of her 96th birthday when she passed away. She had pneumonia and was in the hospital for a week. I stopped by the funeral home and did some pre-planning. Like aok27502 says, the funeral home people will help you.

A relative wrote her own obit, she died within a year of writing it; we used it. The strange thing was that little of what she wrote as the essence of her life was viewed by others as who she was. There were many things for which she stood out that she didn't include. IOW her perception of her value in this life was pretty different than what we believed made her life matter in this world. We must have not done a good job of telling her.

i kinda think obits will disappear unless it's simply not a thing I keep up at this stage in my life. I may be wrong.

I have not written an obituary, but have presented a few eulogeys, ask friends and relatives.

I think an obit is more statistical than the eulogy.

I have for my mother but it was pretty basic and the funeral director provided guidance. I've thought about what to do if DH goes before me. He reads obits every day from all over the country. He's always reading me the interesting and creative ones. I told him he needs to write his own as I won't be able to come up with something worthy of such a great fan of obits.

My dad asked me to write his. He was only 66 when he died of terminal cancer (from diagnosis to dying was only 6 months) and I was honoured that he asked me. He told me that he didn't want to read it, that he wanted me to write it with my mom, who was still alive, in mind. My mom knew that my dad had asked me to write it. I hope that his faith in me was justified.

Yes, I have. Several. In our area, obits are typically very statistical, like someone above said. Very rarely are there flowery, descriptive passages about the deceased's life and/or philosophies of such. The funeral home provided an outline to follow.

Hopefully, all the basic stats are available to you already - birth date, location, parents, spouse(s), children, education, employments. etc.

I wrote both my mother's and my father's in a 6 month period, and I gave a eulogy for both. It's tough thing, and I don't think I could have written either of them in advance. I didn't want the cookie cutter/statistical tupe -- or the flowery, gush-on. When the time came, I was refleccting back, and I found the right words.

If you want to give the statistical history (born, school, married, surviced by, etc), Yeah, you can pretty much fill that out now -- at least most of it. If you don't know it, you can try to do some research or veiled interviewing, storytelling, etc. If you don't learn what you want, consider that they don't care to be remembered that way. Think about why you want to get it right rather than what someone thinks is right and you might be on the right track.

By the way, obits can be very expensive to publish, especially in large cities, so yo may want to keep the info for an obit to wat is needed for notification purposes, limit the family members named to close family and save more than that for smaller papers and the funeral eulogies.

I would think about whether you want the obituary to simply be an announcement/notice to the community that your loved one has died and honor their lives with the info you include...or if you want it to be an actual tribute to them. I think that really depends on the kind of person they were, the life they've lived and what you want to convey.

When my husband died, one of our friends wrote the most amazing obituary about him (I wish I could include it here, but I wish to remain anonymous). It captured the essence of him and her (and others') love for him, along with recognizing the things about him that made him special. It wasn't fact based at all, (meaning, I don't think there was anything about where he was born, or went to school, etc. - it was about his humanity and place in the world). Granted, he was only in his 40's when he died, so there was a lot of sentimentality about his death and life. And our friend is a creative writer.

I'd think about what your loved one's life was like and what people would want to know, along with what you feel is important to say. I love learning something new and interesting from an obituary, not the standard funeral home format.

I have written three obituaries for family members. Personally I think the statistical stuff has a place because it helps their old friends and school associates place them and know who they are. Plus it gives a little refresher for people coming to the funeral on close family members' names. The hardest thing for me was getting together all the factual info such as the preferred name of all spouses of their children, whether or not to include ex-spouses of children (in one case the ex-spouse has remained very close to the family so we did include her), place of birth etc. this is something you can prepare in advance. I felt some pressure to write the obituaries quickly so advance prep would've been useful. If the person has a very close partner or lifelong friend I would mention them, for example my grandfather got a younger girlfriend after my grandmother died and we put "he will also be missed by his special friend" and her name.

My general template is: person's name and age, where passed away, predeceased by, survived by. Then brief sketch of early life, personality and later life accomplishments.

Obits can be extremely expensive to publish in the paper by word and one option is to do a short one in the paper and a longer one at the funeral home's website.

I lost both my parents last year within six months of each other. My brother wrote the obituaries, but had me OK them. MAJOR point to remember: identity theft is very common when too much identifying information is given! Think about it. What kind of info does a crook need to steal an identity? Complete name, and maiden name if a woman; city and state they resided in; date and a place of birth; parents names. Thank goodness I read a very informative article on that before Mom passed, and was able to keep both of their obits thoughtful, but not helpful for any bad guys! Please consider this before you publish! And this goes for the funeral home's obit, as well. There are bad guys who routinely peruse them both for possibilities to use or sell.

I wrote the obit for my dad, and, yes, included some of the obligatory birth, work history, kids and grandchildren, beloved pets, etc., but went further to talk about who he was and why people loved him. The obit wasn't "just the facts", it was a tribute to him, and I tried to capture his spirit, what he meant to individuals, his neighborhood and community and family. I also included what he was good at and what he loved, that he was donating his body to the state university med school to use as they saw fit and that there would be no services, but a party at his home, and specified the date and time. He demanded no services ("If you put me in a church or let one of those bloody priests near my body I'll come back to haunt all of you" was his mantra), so there wasn't an opportunity for a eulogy, I figured the obit was my chance to talk about him, so I made it highly personal.

Go with your gut and what you think the person would have wanted in their heart of hearts, what you want the extended community to know and, of course, what the budget allows.

I neglected to mention that there will likely be no services, placing more importance on the obituaries.

Thank you for your thoughts. I have a better idea of how to proceed, now.

A lot of people are getting away from writing obits these days because fraud and scams that involve the deceased are becoming more and more prevelant. When our Mom passed last year, my sisters and I all agreed to pass on the obit and turned to facebook instead to advise all her friends and family.

No, but my mother in law died last month at 91 and my sister in law wrote a beautiful one. It got me thinking that I'm going to go ahead and talk to my mom about what she wants hers and my dad's to say, and start working on it. She's very open to speaking about death, so I think she will actually welcome the opportunity to help with it.

I wrote my mothers some four years ago or so. Cover the basics and skip the rest. There's usually a space limitation in the papers anyway. You'll never feel it's perfect, but just do it.

Lurkkish's concern reminds me of a story after my mom died. I had written several eulogies for her, including one for a work publication and also on my blog. My mom was an English major and librarian. So one day, at work, out of the blue (sort of) I get an e-mail from someone I did not know, telling me that they found a book of poetry (can't remember by whom) in a used book store in Ann Arbor, with my mom's name inside the cover, and would I be interested in having the book. It lured me in for a nano-second, but luckily I am fairly Internet savvy and I realized this was probably a hook to lure me into some kind of scam. Delete. My mom did put her name in all her books, but even if it was her book (unlikely due to some other reasons) if she got rid of it she didn't want it anymore and neither did I. Since my mom saved many books, I realized it was either a scam or not worth the risk of following up on, she hadn't wanted the book and neither did I if it even was real, which I doubt.

???how was it a scam. I would have fallen for it for sure

It just didn't make sense that this guy would have my mother's book, and if he did, how did he find me and know she had recently died? And even if he had the book with her name in it, she was a librarian, if she got rid of it she didn't want it. It could have been on the up and up but my guess is no, it was the first step in some kind of scam. Since I had posted about mom's death on the Internet and plus her obit, anyone with good Internet searching skills could have found this and other recent deaths information. And even if not, nothing lost and I didn't care or want to risk further involvement with some stranger who contacts me out of the blue.

I've written obituaries for both my parents and for my husband. Actually, I wrote 4 for my husband - a very brief, free one for our local paper, one for the Vinyard Gazette that was much longer, one with picture for an organization of which he was a member, and one for his boarding school. A college friend wrote the one for his university - very kind of him.

@pinkmountain, so you mean a stranger finding a way to make contact at your very vulnerable time to try to get whatever out of you. I was thinking perhaps you were referring to a "specific" scam like the one to click on this button to see what IRS says you've done.

I'm embarrassed to admit I might have tried to make contact in the signed book example. I didn't know every single detail of my Mom's life so an opportunity to learn something new might have been welcome. Now that I've read this, maybe not so quickly.

Come to think of it BV, that sort of relates to the theme of this post and my advice. Mom and I were very close and shared a lot, so I am pretty confident of what she would have done, what she did, etc. I always tell folks, "I know what my mom would have wanted since she told me." And that's my advice, listen and ask questions and get to know folks while they are alive. Make the memories while you can. Reminds me of an old "Doonsbury" cartoon that came out at the time of the initial offering of the "Roots" mini-series, and there was a thread about one of the characters searching out and researching their roots. They went on and on about all the questions they had about their grandfather and how they might find out the answers, and the other character said, "Why don't you just ask him . . . " But this I think is something you don't understand until you wake up one day and all the potential "question answerers" are gone, or outgoing.

http://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1977/03/10

Yes, sort of. A day or so after my husband died the cemetery people helped my daughter and me compose something for our local paper. I couldn't have written anything while he was still alive because my heart and mind just couldn't have done it. The cemetery folks used a template and asked us questions. Later, after his service and the dust had settled, I wished I'd added other things or said things differently. But it was too new and I was still in that weird space of believing it/not believing it.

I hope that one of these days I will write my own obit and say what's important for my last words. Your family and closest friends don't always know these things and it's hard to write creatively in deep grief.

My friend wrote her own obituary. It started "I (name) died on (date)..."

I can't imagine writing that.

I don't think I could write it in the first person. But I would write down things I'd like to be included. I won't stress over it. It's more important to say the things that matter to the people you love when you're still here to say them.

My FIL passed away 2 years ago. He was a widower at 65 and when he was 70+ he remarried to a woman with grown children. He had 2 grown children as well. He was very active in his community, city & his church. The job to write his obituary fell on me, and I worked hard to find the right "balance." I was able to present the "history" of his 1st wife, who'd preceded him & his children & grandchildren pretty darn well, if I say so myself. I was able to weave in the 2nd marriage w/highlights of their time as well, with equal verbiage.

I included his "extended" family -- 2nd wife's kids -- as survivors as well as his own children.

When I presented it to his widow, she said, "Is that all you have to say about me?"

I told her it wasn't her obituary I was writing.

As an amateur genealogist, I treasure an obituary with as much info as possible. But in the times we live in, it's totally understandable that info is limited to protect privacy.