Writing Your Own Obituary Can Teach You How to Live

Hopefully, I’ll continue to update my own obituary for years to come—and learn something about myself along the way.

Recently, I sat down to write my own obituary. I’m not dying anytime soon, or at least I hope not. But a few months back, I attended a workshop run by a local library in Connecticut appropriately called “How to Write Your Own Obit.” I wasn’t ready to pen my own obit then, but one misty Tuesday afternoon, I suddenly felt called to do it.

Typically, an obituary has three parts: the beginning, which tells you the name, age, cause of death; the middle, which celebrates the person’s life; and the end, which covers who the person has left behind—those grieving the subject’s death. An easy-enough structure. But I stared at my screen for a solid ten minutes before I wrote a single word. When I finally started typing, the only words that appeared before me were “Meg” and “Dalton”—my first and last name. Next came “died on DATE from THING at AGE.” Because I’m not a psychic and can’t predict when I’m going to die, I had to insert some placeholder text to keep my momentum going. The next words that flowed from my fingers were some of the hard facts you might find in an obituary, specifically where I was born and raised.

I had the most difficulty writing what followed: the part that describes what the person was like and how they spent their life. The reason I struggled at first was, in part, because I’m still figuring out how I want to live my life. Throughout the obituary-writing process, I repeatedly had to ask myself: “How do I want to be remembered?” “What mark do I want to leave on people’s lives?” “What brings me joy?”

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Obituaries are a lot like most other pieces of journalism. They require sharp interviewing skills, lots of detail, and accurate information. Before death notices were a journalistic form, they served a more practical role—informing members of a community that someone had died. The original death notices were dry, sparse, and lacking in detail. Take for example this obituary from the Revolutionary War era: “Conrad Hipple.—Departed this life on Sunday morning last, the 17 day of June, in the 78 year of his age.”

But during the Civil War, these notices became more personal and sentimental in nature, as more and more young people died in battle and overwhelmed the pages of local newspapers. Then, newspapers started to automate their typesetting, allowing for even more space to eulogize the dead in print. In the 1930s and ’40s, obituaries became what we know them as today—often vivid portraits of someone’s life. One of my favorite obituaries captures this sentiment well: “Hers was an itinerant, much-lived life, a Yankee Florida liberal Jewish Tough Gal who bowled ’em in Japan, rolled ’em in North Carolina and was a singularly unique parent.”

I’ve loved obits for as long as I can remember. In elementary school, I would flip straight to the obituaries in The Huntington Herald, our local weekly, to see if anyone my family knew died recently. These days, I read obits in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Chicago Sun-Times, and more—not to spot anyone I know, but to honor those lives that were lost. I’ve long been fascinated by all things death and dying. Blame it on my Roman Catholic upbringing and all the open-casket wakes that came with it. Ask my friends and they’ll tell you about my obsession with recomposition, or human composting. Whenever I travel, the only must-do on my list is to visit a local cemetery. I even have a section of my personal library dedicated to books about death and dying, including titles like The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries and Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory.

Moral of the story: I don’t shy away from what’s become a taboo topic in our society. There’s a misconception that obituaries are about death. In reality, they’re about life. Sure, they include things like cause of death and the loved ones of the deceased. But a good obit should paint a vivid picture of the life someone lived, of how that person might want to be remembered.

Despite my love of obituaries, writing my own was still a challenge. To get a better sense of how to write one, I called up some experts—people who have spent years writing about the lives and deaths of people known and unknown.

Linnea Crowther, the news editor and lead obituary writer for Legacy.com, has been writing obituaries on and off for twenty-two years. Start with the key facts, she said: “When were they born? Where did they live? Where did they work? Who are they survived by? Where did they go to church, or what organizations were they a member of? That sort of thing that identifies the person beyond a shadow of a doubt.”

Obituaries today can be vivid portraits of someone’s life—what they valued, how they lived, what brought them joy. Reflecting on those questions brought me a step closer to finishing my own obituary. As a journalist of six-plus years so far, I wanted that to be a small part, but not the entirety, of my obituary. I also wanted the breadth and depth of my reporting reflected. So after my name, age, location, and so on, I wrote: “For years, she worked as a journalist and podcast producer, reporting on everything from the art of fictional languages to the history of white violence in America.”

The goal is to not only inform but to also capture who the deceased really was. You can tell a favorite story or share what made them laugh or explain what you’ll miss most about them. “Keeping them alive is what that kind of detail can do,” Crowther said. For my obituary, I’m going to leave this part up to the people I eventually leave behind. If I had my say, I’d want them to recount the time I made them laugh so hard they almost peed or made them feel seen and heard in a special way.

The goal is to not only inform but to also capture who the deceased really was. You can tell a favorite story or share what made them laugh or explain what you’ll miss most about them.

According to Crowther, there’s one important thing to remember when writing an obit: “Everybody has a story that’s worth telling. Some of the most wonderful and fascinating obituaries I’ve read in my career have been for people who weren’t famous and weren’t known by everybody but were so loved by someone in their life.” Love is what makes an obituary shine; it’s what gives the story life—pun intended.

John Pope is the author of the book Getting Off at Elysian Fields: Obituaries from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, a collection of obituaries from the newspaper where he’s written them for the past forty-three years. His subjects—predominantly figures from New Orleans and Louisiana more broadly—have included famous chefs like Leah Chase and musical legends like Fats Domino. Pope says the task of an obituary writer is to find the “Rosebud moment,” a throwback to the classic film Citizen Kane. In the movie, the title character, played by Orson Welles, whispers “Rosebud” on his deathbed; a reporter is then tasked with discovering the meaning of the word. It turns out “Rosebud” refers to the name of the sled he used to play with as a child before he was taken away from his mother—his last moments of innocence and happiness.

Pope, who himself has written his own obituary twice now, says that if you don’t have the personality in the obituary, you’ve got nothing. “The first night of Passover, there’s a question, ‘How is this night different from all other nights?’” he said. “Well, how is this life different from all other lives? What makes this person stand out?” That interrogation—how one’s life is different from all other lives—can be difficult. With writing your own obituary, I learned that you don’t necessarily have the distance or dispassion to answer that question, at least at my age.

For now, I decided to include some character traits that others have pointed out to me, namely my curiosity and empathy: “She was deeply curious about the people and world around her. Outside of work, she was vocal about the things she cared about. When she was in her twenties and thirties, she was an abortion doula at Planned Parenthood clinics in Connecticut and New York and frequently attended protests on everything from racial justice to abortion rights.”

If you don’t know where to begin, it doesn’t hurt to ask your friends and family members. Seeing yourself through the eyes of others can be powerful. You can ask them to share some of your favorite memories, or what they love about you. Harrison Smith, obituary reporter for The Washington Post, told me that he’s always looking for telling quotes or anecdotes, something that captures the way a person was. “You don’t wanna write a résumé and you don’t wanna write a eulogy, right? So I think a great news obituary is a balanced look at a person’s life, for better or worse,” he said.

When thinking about balance, I also thought my wide range of interests should be reflected in the obituary: “Meg often joked that her hobby was collecting hobbies. Throughout her life, she tried everything from rock climbing and hiking to sewing and knitting.” Likewise, I wanted my obituary to communicate that I loved the people in my life but also that I had a sense of humor. And so I wrote: “She loved her family and friends more than anything in the world. Except maybe puns.”

When I started writing my own obituary, my intent was to make things easier for my family at the end of my life. I figured, in case I suddenly die, I will have crossed one thing off their checklist. But intent is different from impact. Writing my own obituary turned out to be an exercise in living.

Writing my own obituary turned out to be an exercise in living. 

My obituary won’t be fully finished until I die. The bits and pieces sprinkled throughout this piece are just reflections of what I value in life today, in this moment. But what I value might change as the years pass. Unlike writing an obituary for someone else, writing your own obituary gives you a chance to audit your own life. It’s helped me take note of what I want more of—and less of—in my day-to-day life.

Obituaries, like our lives, are meant to evolve and change. I’ll have to revise my obituary as I continue to grow; the draft I have today might look radically different from the one I update thirty years from now. Hopefully, I’ll continue to update my obituary for years to come—and learn something about myself along the way.