How to Write Obituaries
Pope Francis died today at 88, and obituaries and remembrances of the leader of the Roman Catholic Church are already everywhere.
Regardless of your faith practice, it’s an opportunity to study the obituary as a storytelling form. Well-crafted obituaries provide context and appreciation for the life and accomplishments of people whether they’re famous, infamous, or ordinary folks.
An obituary should make the person “recognizable to people who knew them and connect them to people who didn’t,” according to Kristen Hare, an obituary reporter at the Tampa Bay Times who spoke about the craft at the ASJA 2025 conference in New York. “It’s a different kind of storytelling that requires a different approach.”
To Write an Obituary, Research Is a Must
Like any other type of article, an obituary requires research.
“There’s a fog of grief that happens when people die” and it leads family to use platitudes to describe them, Hare said at the conference. “You hear, ‘They had a heart of gold,’ over and over.” Hare suggests asking “What did that look like?” to get past the platitudes.
The result can be details that convey the essence of who a person was. “I wrote about a math professor who asked his wife to sew an extra button in his collar, that’s how buttoned up he was,” Hare said. She also wrote about a one-time beauty queen who portrayed Ariel from “The Little Mermaid” at Disney World in the 1980s and used it as a platform to talk about HIV and AIDS “at a time when nobody was talking about it.”
When writing obits, Hare said she looks for scenes, both personal and public. “I want to discover who people were through what they did,” she said.
I recently pre-wrote an obituary for a family member. I was fortunate that dozen years ago, this family member received a Christmas gift of a fill-in-the-blanks story of your life book kit with prompts to write about their ancestors, childhood, education, work, hobbies, and other aspects of life. They spent the next year working on it. The next Christmas, they gave out as gifts an 80-page “The Story of a Lifetime” – which I used when writing the obituary to confirm dates and for a couple quotes.
If you have the advantage of writing an obituary before someone dies, looking through old photos or memorabilia is another way to get them to talk about their lives. It doesn’t hurt to be direct – ask how they would like to be remembered.
Steve Jobs and Examples of Traditional and Nontraditional Obituaries
Obituaries can many different forms. Besides the classic, straight narrative, obits can be a personal remembrance, photo montage, video, slideshow, or compilation of quotes from the famous or not-so-famous.
When Steve Jobs died in 2011, tributes to the Apple cofounder were everywhere. Here are a handful of Jobs obituaries I originally analyzed in my WordCount blog that stuck with me for their context, emotion, or originality:
Traditional Obituary – Straight forward obituaries from the New York Times and Washington Post, attempt to put the man behind the Mac, iPod and iPhone in perspective, as a 21st century entrepreneur, tech visionary and marketer with a prickly, secretive side that made him a difficult subject to interview or photograph.
Personal Remembrance – Famed tech industry chronicler and columnist Walter Mossberg shared stories about a side of Jobs most people never saw. After returning to Apple in 1997, Jobs called Mossberg Sunday evenings for some off-the-record shop talk. Later when he was sick, Jobs invited Mossberg to visit him at home and the two went for a walk:
He explained that he walked each day, and that each day he set a farther goal for himself, and that, today, the neighborhood park was his goal. As we were walking and talking, he suddenly stopped, not looking well. I begged him to return to the house, noting that I didn’t know CPR and could visualize the headline: “Helpless reporter lets Steve Jobs die on the sidewalk.”
But he laughed, and refused, and, after a pause, kept heading for the park. We sat on a bench there, talking about life, our families, and our respective illnesses. (I had had a heart attack some years earlier.) He lectured me about staying healthy. And then we walked back.
Apology – Brian Lam used Jobs’ passing to write a long apologia and explain what happened while he was editor at Gizmodo during the infamous iPhone 4 leak in 2010. After an Apple employee lost a phototype of the phone and it ended up in the hands of a Gizmodo reporter who wrote about it, Lam exchanged numerous telephone calls with an increasingly more frustrated Jobs, who wanted the device back but didn’t want to publicly confirm what it was. Lam held out and got confirmation in writing, but later regretted it. “I thought about the dilemma every day for about a year and half,” he writes in The Atlantic. “It caused me a lot of grief, and I stopped writing almost entirely. It made my spirit weak. Three weeks ago, I felt like I had had enough. I wrote my apology letter to Steve.”
Website – For a day after Jobs died, tech site BoingBoing temporarily rebooted its design to mimic the then-revolutionary (and still very black and white) graphical user interface of the original 1984 Macintosh computer.
Slideshow – As part of its coverage of Jobs’ passing, the New York Times asked readers to send in thoughts and photos, which the paper assembled into a “Reader Memories” slideshow. One family of a grandmother in Chile who’d recently died of cancer sent in a picture of her in bed with a MacBook Pro on her lap making a last video-phone call to a granddaughter in Belgium.
Video – For its homage, social media new site Mashable compiled a video of Jobs’ 10 most “magical” moments, including introducing the first Macintosh and launching the iPod, iPhone and iPad. In place of the photographs of Bob Dylan, Pablo Picasso, Maria Calas, and other square pegs originally featured in the classic “Think Different” commercial Gizmodo substituted photos and videos of Jobs during his various stints at Apple, granting him star status through association.
Cartoon – Cartoonist Hugh McLeod used the copy from the same “Think Different” ad as the basis for a text-only cartoon that he posted on his website and offered free to anyone who wanted to download it.
Other Resources for Writing Obituaries
Here are a few other resources for inspiration for writing obituaries:
Obituaries are important, worth rethinking and reviving. Kristen Hare wrote this Poynter piece in 2021, two and a half years into her time on the obituary beat and after receiving a fellowship to study digital format obituaries. It shares lessons learned from writing obituary features and how she launched an obituary newsletter.
How to write the perfect obituary, according to professional writers. Writer Nicole Spector used this 2019 NBC Better by Today piece to share what she’s learned writing obituaries for family members as well as advice from writers who provide obituary writing services.
Not Dead Yet. If you like your learning with a dose of entertainment, watch both seasons of this now-cancelled ABC sitcom featuring Gina Rodriguez as a newspaper obituary writer who could see the dead people she’s supposed to write about. In each episode, Rodriguez’s character learns enough about the life of that week’s obituary subject to write “deeply emotional, personal tributes” by the closing credits.
Michelle Rafter is a business reporter turned ghostwriter based in Portland, Oregon. She’s ASJA’s publications chair and has been a member since 2010.