How to Write Your Own Obituary: Template, Examples and Why People Do It

To write your own obituary, gather the key facts (dates, places, full names), choose a tone that genuinely sounds like you, open with a line nobody else would write, tell your life in three or four short chapters, name and thank your people, and end with your service or memorial wishes. Most published obituaries run 200 to 600 words.

People take on this strange little assignment for three reasons, and none of them is morbid. Control: you decide what the record says, and the facts come out right. Kindness: your family is spared drafting the hardest paragraph of their lives in the two days after losing you. Reflection: few exercises clarify what matters like summarising your life while you can still change the ending.

This guide gives you a fill-in structure, three worked examples in different tones, the story of the famous self-written obituaries that turned this into a tradition, and practical notes on length and cost. It is also honest about the limit of the form. An obituary can hold your facts, but not your voice or your telling. Preserving those is the job of a digital legacy app, where the stories behind the summary live on as a Persona your family can actually talk with. Start free: 50 memories, no card.

In this guide:

• Why write your own obituary?

• What goes into an obituary: the essential elements

• A fill-in template you can use today

• Three tones, three examples

• The famous self-written obituaries

• Length, cost and where it runs

• The obituary as a life reflection exercise

• What an obituary cannot hold

• Frequently asked questions

Why write your own obituary?

Start with control. Obituaries written in the fog of the first week are full of small wrongs: a misspelled maiden name, a wrong graduation year, a forty-year career reduced to one job title, a beloved stepchild accidentally left off the list. Nobody intends these errors. They happen because the writer is grieving, the funeral home needs the text within a day or two, and nobody can find the folder with the dates in it. When you write your own, the record is right, because the one person who knew all of it did the checking.

Then kindness. Ask anyone who has done it: composing a parent's obituary at midnight, two days after the death, with siblings disagreeing over what to include, is among the hardest writing tasks there is. Handing your family a finished draft, or even a rough one, is a genuine gift. They can trim it, add the service details and get on with grieving, instead of staring at a blank page that is somehow supposed to hold you.

And reflection. Writing your own obituary is a classic values exercise for a reason. Forcing a whole life into 400 words tells you immediately which parts carry the plot. Career coaches assign it to clarify priorities, and hospice workers hear versions of it in every life review. Many people finish a draft, look at what made the cut, and quietly change how they spend their Tuesdays.

It also slots neatly into practical planning. A finished obituary is one line item on a good end-of-life checklist, next to the will, the passwords and the funeral wishes, and it is the only item on that list that is genuinely pleasant to produce.

What goes into an obituary: the essential elements

Obituaries are a flexible form, but readers, editors and funeral homes expect certain elements. Here is the standard anatomy, with notes on what trips people up.

One distinction saves confusion later. The obituary is the written public record, printed or posted; the eulogy is the spoken tribute someone delivers at the service. They share material but do different jobs. If someone you love will one day stand up and give yours, our guide to writing a eulogy, including where AI help works and where it should stop, is the companion to this page.

A fill-in template you can use today

Open a blank page, set a timer for 45 minutes, and work through these seven steps. Placeholders are fine. A rough draft your family can polish beats a perfect draft that never gets written.

1. Open with the announcement. The conventional form is: [Full name], [age], of [town], died [peacefully / at home / after a long illness] on [date]. Or ignore convention and open in your own voice, with the one sentence only you would write. The famous self-penned obituaries almost all break form in the first line.

2. Give your beginnings one or two sentences. Born in [place] in [year] to [parents' names], you grew up [one true detail: the farm, the flat above the shop, the town everyone left]. Resist the urge to list every school.

3. Choose three chapters. Work, love, craft, faith, service, travel, the team you coached, the business you built. Pick the three that mattered most and give each a sentence or two. A life does not need to be complete on paper to be recognisable.

4. Name your people. Survived by [names]; predeceased by [names]. Include the relationships that were real regardless of paperwork. This is the paragraph families keep, so spell every name correctly and leave nobody out that you intend to include.

5. Add three specifics. The 1974 Corolla that would not die. Forty years of Sunday roasts. Undefeated at Scrabble and insufferable about it. Specific details are what make readers laugh and cry, because the details are where you are actually visible.

6. Close with intention. A thank you, an instruction (hug your kids, plant something, tip generously), or the joke you always wanted the last word on. This sentence is the one people will quote.

7. Add logistics placeholders, then store it where it will be found. Leave bracketed gaps for the service details, save the draft with your will and funeral papers, and tell one person it exists. An obituary nobody can find helps nobody.

On voice: third person ([Name] loved...) reads as traditional and is easiest for family to extend; first person (I loved...) instantly signals a self-written farewell and gives you far more room. Both are accepted everywhere obituaries run. Pick one and stay consistent.

Three tones, three examples

Here is the same invented woman, Margaret "Peg" Sullivan, written three ways. Borrow the skeleton of whichever sounds most like you. All three Pegs are fictional.

The traditional obituary

Margaret Anne "Peg" Sullivan, 84, of Dayton, Ohio, died peacefully at home on [date]. Born in 1942 to James and Ruth Kelly, she graduated from Ohio State University and taught fourth grade at Holy Angels School for 36 years, where two generations of students learned long division and fair play. She married Thomas Sullivan in 1966, and they shared 51 years until his death in 2017. She is survived by her children Kathleen, Brian and Ellen, seven grandchildren, and her sister Rose. A funeral Mass will be held at [church] on [date]. In lieu of flowers, please consider a gift to the Holy Angels scholarship fund.

Steady, factual, third person. This is the register most newspapers expect, and the easiest for a family member to finish on your behalf.

The warm obituary

If you are reading this, I have gone on ahead, and I want you to know it was a wonderful ride. I was born in 1942, raised on brown bread and hymns, and spent 84 years being astonished by ordinary things. I married the man who made me laugh on our first date and kept it up for half a century. I taught small children, grew impossible roses, and burned exactly one Thanksgiving turkey, in 1989, which my family never once let me forget. Thank you for being part of my story. Look after each other, and somebody please water the roses.

First person, direct address, gratitude said out loud. This tone suits people who want the reader comforted rather than merely informed.

The funny obituary

Peg Sullivan is done. After 84 years of arriving everywhere early, she has finally left early too. She departs with one regret (never learning the accordion), one grudge (the 1978 parish bake-off was rigged, and she could prove it), and zero unreturned library books. She leaves behind three children she raised on threats she never once carried out, seven grandchildren who could do no wrong, and a garage full of Tupperware lids that match nothing. In lieu of flowers, tell an embarrassing story about her at the reception. She would absolutely have told one about you.

Humour lands hardest at a funeral because nobody expects to laugh there, and grief loosens everything. If you write funny, the family reading it aloud will hear your delivery. Just keep one sincere line inside the jokes, because that is the line everyone will remember.

The famous self-written obituaries

Writing your own farewell has a proud modern tradition, and the entries people still share years later all have the same ingredient: the person's actual voice, arriving from exactly the place you least expect to hear it.

The humourist Art Buchwald managed the definitive version. For The New York Times' video obituary series The Last Word, Buchwald recorded his own entry in advance, and when it ran in January 2007 it opened with him grinning at the camera and saying: "Hi, I'm Art Buchwald, and I just died." He had spent months in hospice setting up that laugh, and he got it.

In 2013, Seattle writer Jane Lotter published her own obituary after choosing to end treatment for cancer. Its most quoted line, "I was given the gift of life, and now I have to give it back," travelled around the world. Two years later, retired Florida teacher Emily Phillips opened hers with "it pains me to admit it, but apparently, I have passed away," and millions of strangers read the farewell of a woman they had never met. Delaware's Walter Bruhl Jr. went full Monty Python in 2014, declaring himself "a dead person; he is no more; he is bereft of life." His grandson posted it online, and it promptly went viral.

Amy Krouse Rosenthal's 2017 Modern Love essay, "You May Want to Marry My Husband," written ten days before her death, is not an obituary in form, but it is the same act: a person choosing her own last public words. The lesson from all of these is not that you must be funny or literary. It is that a farewell in someone's own voice is so rare that when one appears, the world stops to read it. That rarity is the thing you can fix now, while the writing is easy.

Length, cost and where it runs

Print obituaries are paid notices in most newspapers, priced by the line or column inch, with an extra charge for photographs. Costs vary enormously by paper and length: a short notice in a small local paper can cost very little, while a long obituary with a photo in a major metropolitan daily can run to many hundreds of dollars, sometimes more. Few families budget for this in advance, which is one more reason the drafting is better done calmly, now.

Online is far more forgiving. Funeral home websites typically include an obituary page in their service packages, with no meaningful length limit, and platforms such as Legacy.com syndicate notices from thousands of newspapers. The practical move is to keep two versions of yours: the full telling for the funeral home page, and a tight 150 to 200 word cut for print, so your family is not editing you down at the worst possible moment.

Where it runs, and whether it runs in print at all, is a funeral decision like any other. Slot the finished draft into your funeral planning checklist beside the music, the readings and the venue, and the whole package travels together.

The obituary as a life reflection exercise

Even if your obituary is never published, or you tear it up afterwards, writing it is worth an afternoon. The exercise has been used for decades in values work: write the summary of your life as if it ended today, then read it back and notice what is missing. The gap between the life you summarised and the one you meant to live is instruction. People discover the chapter they keep postponing, the person they never properly thanked, and, often, that the job they sacrifice everything for did not even make their own final paragraph.

There is a gentler discovery too. Most people sit down to write 300 words and stand up with pages. The turkey story needs the whole scene to be funny. The account of how you met your partner refuses to compress. Your father's advice only makes sense with his accent attached. A summary, it turns out, is a door to the stories rather than a container for them.

That overflow is not a problem. It is the point. If drafting your obituary unlocked more than 400 words can hold, that material is exactly what it means to record your life story, question by question, in your own spoken words, while the telling is still yours.

What an obituary cannot hold

Be clear-eyed about what this document is. An obituary is a summary shaped by a newspaper's format: a few hundred silent words, fixed at the moment of printing. It can say you loved fishing. It cannot tell the story of the day the boat sank, with your pauses, your exaggerations, and the laugh you could never hold in until the end.

It cannot answer, either. In the weeks after a funeral, what families want is not a better summary. They want one more conversation: the recipe explained properly, the advice asked for again, the voice. Paper was never going to do that job, however well you write.

This is where the exercise can lead somewhere bigger. With Afterlife AI™ you build a Persona while you are alive: your memories, your stories and your voice, preserved as you actually sound, so your family keeps not just the record but the teller. It is the difference between reading that Peg was funny and hearing the bake-off grudge defended one more time. The obituary becomes the headline of a larger family legacy rather than the whole of it. Plans, and the free way to begin, are on the pricing page.

And if you arrived here to write an obituary for a parent rather than for yourself, the same logic applies with more urgency. The facts can be gathered later. The telling cannot, so preserve a parent's voice while the stories are still being told.

Sources

• Legacy.com: How to Write an Obituary

• The New York Times, Modern Love: You May Want to Marry My Husband (Amy Krouse Rosenthal, 2017)

• Wikipedia: Art Buchwald

• Wikipedia: Obituary