When my mother-in-law passed away earlier this year, my brother-in-law spent hours painstakingly crafting her obituary. It was a labor of love, done in the midst of grief. He could have been helped by ...

An obituary may well be the hardest thing to write. It has to be composed in a hurry during a period of bereavement. Those closest to the person who died may not be in a condition to write it. The ...

Re “Why I Write My Obituary Every Year,” by Kelly McMasters (Opinion guest essay, Sept. 29): I felt so connected to Ms. McMasters’s essay. Like her, I started this ritual when I was a child. Back then ...

When his grandmother died about two years ago, Jebar King, the writer of his family, was tasked with drafting her obituary. But King had never written one before and didn’t know where to start. The ...

She will not be missed, thus reads the concluding sentence in one of the most jaw-dropping obituaries we've ever read. The obituary for Kathleen Dehmlow starts innocently enough, that she was born ...

When most people think of death notices, they imagine dry, formulaic paragraphs. These seem to be written by an undertaker with a thesaurus. But, there’s a hidden world that sees this as a form of ...

Two days after Jeff Fargo’s mother died, he lay in bed, crying, at home in Nevada and opened his laptop to ChatGPT. Her friends had asked about an obituary, so for nearly an hour he typed about her ...

“I wanted to do right by their families, and leave a historical record ensuring that their full lives, and not just their passing, were recorded and remembered.” In June, the writer Lore Segal, who ...

Editor's note: This editorial mentions suicide and overdose. Jonathan Nalikka was one of my close friends in high school. I remember him as the boy standing by my kitchen sink with yellow rubber ...

In June, the writer Lore Segal, who had started hospice at her home in Manhattan, sent an email to her friends. “I am not sad or angry or afraid,” she wrote, according to a lovely profile in the New ...