AARP Hearing Center
Tom Paul keeps a draft of his obituary in a black binder on a bookshelf in his study. His wife knows it’s there (hers is right beside it), as do his four daughters.
The 82-year-old from New London, New Hampshire, wants to be prepared.
“It’s good to have something like this on hand because you just never know when things are going to go the wrong way in your life,” he says. “And I thought that maybe I'm the best spokesman for myself.”
Writing your own obituary has a lot of perks. Presumably, you know yourself best, as Paul says. You could also save your survivors an awful lot of work at a time when they're dealing with grief — or shock if your death is sudden — and are handling funeral arrangements, estates and a host of other practical, unpleasant tasks.
And being the one to encapsulate your entire existence in (typically) a couple hundred words gives you agency when it comes to one of the last memories you leave behind.
“The process does require you to think about what’s important and what you want other people to know about you,” Paul says.
Even then, it can be difficult to distill what information to include. After much reflection and revision, Paul eventually whittled his original version, which came in at 840 words, down to 322 words. While the truncated narrative lists hobbies such as jogging, he struck details including his completion of the 1981 Boston Marathon in three hours and 37 minutes as a “back-of-the-pack bandit.” He also wound up deleting this admission: “Sadly, he failed at golf.”
Paul did, however, decide to keep one piece of information he says he sees in 90 percent of the obituaries he reads — that he “died peacefully.”
Writing a meaningful obituary
Margo Steiner, who leads virtual obituary-writing workshops, has seen interest in the topic grow over the last decade as the death-positive movement has gained ground. People are talking more openly about the end of life — and accepting that death is, in fact, going to happen.
“More people are beginning to think that when they die, they want to have control over what's said about them,” says Steiner, 72, of Marblehead, Massachusetts. She has heard stories from several workshop participants that, when relying on funeral homes to piece together a spouse’s obituary, the end result was riddled with punctuation and factual errors. “They’re thinking, ‘I can do this better myself.’”
